Hello all,
First, let me apologize for being a couple of days late in responding to this thread. My attention was elsewhere late last week and I missed some posts here. Also, parts of this message will be cross-posted in a couple of threads so that folks will see it where it’s relevant to them.
I’m going to start with the most important thing: the issues mentioned in this thread are among a handful of issues that are being actively investigated at very high priority by our engineering team. We are committed to resolving them as soon as possible. Everybody from the CEO on down is aware and focused on getting them solved.
Now, let me say a little bit more about what’s going on, and towards the bottom of this post there are some suggestions for workarounds that should help until we have direct solutions.
The issue with the screen going to black after playback falls into a category called “interoperability.” In other words, issues that crop up when the player is connected to certain other components like receivers or displays, or sometimes combinations of receivers and displays. The occasional signal drops may be interop related, or they may be cable related. More on that below, but first more about interoperability.
Part of the development process of any new A/V component is interoperability testing. We’ve been doing interop testing throughout the development of Strato V, with a variety of equipment. Testing has been done in a laboratory environment, through industry interoperability (“plugfest”) events, and through alpha and beta testing in people’s homes. Contrary to speculation posted here, this testing has involved components at many price points — not just high-end flagship products. We had a Marantz processor as part of our laboratory testing setup, and while we did find one minor interop issue with that processor, we did not encounter the black screen issue. We have industry contacts with Denon/Marantz, and we will work with them as needed as we have done in the past.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to test every possible model and software revision of AV receiver/processor, display, distribution system, and cable. And so, issues can and do appear after release that need to be identified and addressed.
To that end,
we do need a bit of help from you. Our players log and report diagnostic information back to us, and so if we know that your player is exhibiting an interoperability issue, our support team can flag it to the engineering team, which can use that logged information in helping identify what the root cause is. So, if you are having an issue with your player, please open a support ticket by emailing
support@kaleidescape.com if you have not done so already. Provide your player serial number and a description of the issue. It's helpful if you can tell us the make and model of equipment connected to your player (
i.e. your audio processor/receiver, your display, and any other intermediate gear like video processors, distribution systems, HDMI extenders, etc.)
I'd also like to publicly apologize to
@Broncowrangler, whose support experience hasn't been the best. His initial contact to support was accidentally closed as a duplicate by a support team member who mistook it for a different message, and so that cost a significant amount of time in getting an initial response.
I do want to set expectations here, too -- as described by others, once you have an issue in to support, if that issue needs to be escalated to the engineering team, it can take some time for the team to investigate the issue and either come back with a solution, or with a request to the customer for additional information or troubleshooting. There are weekly meetings between support and engineering to go over all of the cases that have been escalated to engineering. Periodic status updates back to the customer are not part of that process. We'll take that as a suggestion, though.
Now, some things you can try, if you're having one of the issues mentioned here.
As already described in this thread, multiple people have reported being able to work around the black screen at the end of playback by setting the onscreen display’s refresh rate to a fixed value rather than using the automatic setting. We’ve had reports that both 60Hz and 24Hz work. I would personally suggest trying 60 first because the OSD animation will be smoother. You can access this setting through your system’s browser interface. If you don’t know how to access your browser interface, here’s a support article:
https://support.kaleidescape.com/article/Accessing-the-Browser-Interface
Once in the browser interface, go to the Settings tab, select the Components sub-tab, and then click the “Settings” button for the affected Strato V player. This will open a popup window, defaulted to the Video tab. Click “Show Advanced Settings”, change the popup under “OSD Refresh Rate”, and then scroll to the bottom of the window and click OK.
Momentary dropouts during playback are often caused by issues with HDMI communication, and these are frequently related to the cable. If you are not using the cable that came with your player, please try using that cable. Kaleidescape players can be pretty demanding source devices, since we’re sending high-quality video and lossless audio, which requires maximum bandwidth from the cable.
If the supplied cable is not long enough, we’d suggest that you try another cable from the same product line. You can find them here:
Pixelgen Design
Minimally, please ensure that you are using a high quality “Ultra High Speed” HDMI cable.
Also, if you have multiple devices in your HDMI signal chain, as Jim mentioned, it can often be more difficult to identify where a problem lies. A good strategy is to start by connecting the player directly to the display. If everything works well there, re-introduce other components, one at a time.
Finally, one thing that can help many HDMI compatibility issues is to limit the bandwidth sent over the cable. If your Strato V is on its default setting of "Allow Display Mode Changes", then most film content is going to be played at ~24 frames per second. This doesn't require the full bandwidth of the cable, and so setting the maximum bandwidth to 13.5Gbps may improve robustness. This is in the same Advanced Settings group mentioned above, in the section called "4K Ultra HD Support". Choose the 13.5Gbps option, then scroll to the bottom and click OK.
