“No Signal” intermittently

When playing movie from VLC while HDMI source (Nintendo Switch in my case) is connected but without power supply, PPM intermittently jump to the yellowish “No Signal” screen for few seconds and then switch back automatically.

Anyone experienced such annoying interruptions?

It still happening to me every single day.
10 seconds interruption in the middle of a movie every now and then is not acceptable!

Anyone from Philips can feedback or anyway I can fire a bug report please?

Have you tried removing the HDMI cable from the PPMax? My unit got “stuck” on the no signal screen (couldn’t even get to the home screen) until I removed the USB-C cable that was plugged into the video in port…

hi @fhteagle , i have encountered your issue too, no less!
I know removing the HDMI/USB-C cable would make the no signal screen go away. But i don’t want to switching back and forth the physical connection only for this obvious bug. My TV with 3 HDMI sources connected wouldn’t prompt me no signal for no reason.

Thanks for confirming i’m not alone.

I just upgraded to 1.0.25. No signal problem is still there.

That must be very annoying! Roughly how often does the PPM attempt to switch, is it regular or random intervals?

If the Switch is connected to the PPM HDMI port I assume the Switch sits in its dock. Is the dock powered but the Switch is in sleep mode, or have you removed power to the dock at this point?

I’ve noticed that the Switch tends to wake up periodically for some form of housekeeping. I wonder if the PPM sees that as activity on the HDMI link.

Will the PPM autoselect the HDMI input when the Switch is powered up even though some other source is active?

Power was removed from the dock of the Switch after I encountered the problem for the first time. It’s only power up when I want to play games. So Switch shouldn’t have enough power to drive the display output. Possibly, however, the internal battery of Mario is still capable to send signal down to the hdmi line when it wakes up for some reason like you said.

How PPM handle that signal is another story. I never see my TV respond to that wake up call even when the dock has power.

I didn’t measure accurately how often the no signal screen came up. At least once in an hour is for sure as it interrupted every episode I’m watching in a series. PPM should at least let me choose to disable the input source auto detection if that’s the cause.

I agree, auto detection should definitely be possible to disable, something that might already be on the feature list?

I checked with a Switch in a dock here and while the Switch is perfectly capable of outputting video without external power, the Switch directs all video to the internal screen when no charger is connected to the dock. That’s likely all firmware decisions so it’s still possible for something to show up on the hdmi output. The PPM might just be a bit too trigger happy compared to other sinks.

@Philips_Support_P @Philips_Support_N
Please provide technical support here. Thx!

Hi @Lun,

the PicoPix Max is designed as a simple-to-use portable projector. The way it chooses which input source to show is therefore also simple and automatic:

  • the projector will automatically switch to the most recent cable that’s plugged in. No need to switch source manually.
  • when you unplug a cable, the projector goes back to the source that was previously active.
  • pressing [Home] always switches to the internal Android.
  • from the Settings screen you can switch to another source manually.

So what’s likely happening in your case is that the HDMI device is periodically activating (for whatever reason), and then deactivating, but never sending an actual video signal.

The workaround at the moment is to unplug the cable.

I am tempted to say the external device is the problem (by periodically sending bogus activations). But we are monitoring this user-experience, and if many people complain, we will add an option to turn off this automatic-source-selection feature.

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