Occasional black screen with Vizio tv while playing a game

[Lounges]

I am running into an issue with the steam link and a new tv (Vizio e48u-d0) I recently purchased. Everything is hard wired and runs GREAT most of the time. The problem is once every maybe 5 minutes or so the video goes completely black for 1-2 seconds and then continues great. Looking at the performance overlay there are no spikes or anything. When I plug this steam link into another TV in my house (a Panasonic TC-P50ST60) it runs great without this issue.

Near as I can tell this particular TV is initiating some kind of hdmi handshake or something periodically that causes the display to pause but everything else to continue. The tv does not exhibit this behavior with other set top boxes (chrome cast and roku).

I can grab the logs later this evening and post if it would be helpful, but it sounds like the logs are generally in between the host and the link and not between the link and the tv where the problem exists. Can I connect to syslog or something on the link?

Has anyone heard of something like this happening?

Some things I have tried:
- Every possible combination of hardware encoding options on the host
- Various quality settings
- Every hdmi port on the tv
- Disabling every image processing setting on the tv
- Forcibly downgrading the steamlink to verison 499 which some people seem to have had luck with
- Forcibly setting the steamlink resolution using a textfile and usb
- Multiple hdmi/network cables
- Different routers

[Yellig]

I haven't seen it anywhere near as often as you, but my Vizio (a different model) does the same thing, only with all of my HDMI inputs. In my case, it seems to be completely random.

When I researched this for my issue, I learned that this is a symptom of the (apparently) cheap HDMI hardware that Vizio uses on most of their models. :-(

The fact that it is happening so often and only with the Link, however, does imply that there is a specific issue there. Make sure to submit a bug report with your TV's model number.

[Calador]

I just ran into this issue and the solution was with the Vizio. I set Picture Mode to Computer and it was instantly fixed. I tried to first disable hardware acceleration but in made no difference for me.

[Lounges]

I tried with this setting on this afternoon and it did not make any difference. Glad it worked for you though.

[Calador]

I hope you get yours running. I have found two other possible fixes.
1) make sure you use an hdmi 2.0 cable in the 2.0 port
2) move non-4k device to differnt port. My tv had 1x 2.0 and 3x 1.4 ports. This solved same issue with my Roku 3 on same tv

[NinjaSloth]

I realize this thread is now 5-6 years old but I was having this issue as well (recently) and I believe I have solved it by performing a system update on the Vizio TV. Hopefully this helps others who run into this issue as well.