I took a spare HDMI cable and killed pin 13 then plugged that end into my Vero 4K+ and everything works as expected now, but obviously no CEC from the Vero.
All the other devices work as expected with CEC and inputs don’t switch on their own.
If I put the HDMI cable with pin 13 still intact back into the Vero, it’s starts hogging the HDMI again.
Tried shutting everything down, unplug the power strip from the wall, and cold boot everything back up… Vero still hogs HDMI.
I tried booting the TV first, then a different device next like a game system, and the Vero same results with HDMI hogging.
Tried booting Vero before other devices and I get the same result.
So it doesn’t appear to matter which devices engage CEC first, second, or last.
Once Vero boots up it hogs HDMI.
If I switch to another input, the Vero makes my TV or my receiver switch back to it.
So only way to use other inputs on my receiver or my TV or the built in TV apps is to unplug the Vero or use the HDMI cable with pin 13 removed.
So I’m just going to stick with my modded HDMI cable for now.
I was just going to disable CEC on every device but it needs to be on in order to use ARC from the TV.
Even when I disabled the CEC on the Vero, it still hogged the HDMI so I think the solution for most will be to mod an HDMI cable or get a CEC-less HDMI adaptor.
I was having issues with a4ksubtitles plugin recently and i was also stuck on the March 2022 release of OSMC because of similar issues. My sound bar (connected by HDMI) would seeming randomly complain about being unable to sync to the TV via CEC or refuse to turn on correctly). The only way to get things back to normal behaviour was to unplug the vero 4k, turn everything off , turn it back on and then plug the vero 4k back in… and then wait a random amount of time before it happened again. Well I upgraded to the lastest release (March 2025) to address the a4ksubtitles plugin issue and suffered the same fate. Thankfully i was looking around the settings area and noticed a setting called " disable lock hdmi HPD" and well it now works like a charm! no more problems.
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=224196 might help also
Thanks for your feedback.
Many years ago we added the HPD Lock function for problematic HDMI scenarios. I personally had a very long HDMI cable embedded in a wall that wasn’t easy to relocate and a picky AVR that kept trying to try and negotiate things. Disabling HPD Lock will stop de-asserts and in turn stop unnecessary ones.
Enabling HPD Lock keeps HPD asserted, preventing false disconnects and the renegotiations that can confuse CEC/ARC.
Sam
Oh, this fixes the old CEC ARC issue with the soundbars? I’ve been stuck on March 2022 release as well, as that was the latest release without the issue. Just checking the forum every few months to see on any fixes on this. There was a setting all this time which we never tried? I might go try updating then.
Is yours still working after this month passed?
Does your TV remote over CEC still work with this setting?
It would be interesting if that is indeed the solution for those problematic devices.