Saturday, March 25, 2017

Nvidia Shield Video Loss Issue

I recently got the excellent NVIDIA Shield and quickly hooked it up in to my existing Home Theater Set up (Shield -> 4k Receiver -> 4K TV) . I noticed that whenever I increased/decreased the volume on the receiver, the Shield would lose the video signal for a good 2 seconds or so and this would happen whether there was a video playing or not. After a lot of searching on Reddit and the shield forums I learnt that there is a HDMI handshake issue with Sony receivers  and that nothing could be done about it other than replacing the receiver or just setting the volume before playing any video.

After some days I plugged my HTPC back in and noticed it was doing the same thing !!! So I turned off the last thing that I turned on the Samsung TV which was UHD Mode. That did the trick, no more loss of video when I changed the volume. Switch over to the shield, the issue was still happening so I went in to the display settings. This is where I remembered another thing : I hate the soap opera feel on movies so I had set the refresh rate of TV at 4k @ 24fps . The shield was set was 4k @ 60 hz, so i lowered it down to 23.976 hz and no more flickering, everything was working fine !!

So if you have the NVIDIA Shield with a Sony Receiver make sure they are set to the proper settings for the display.