[SOLVED] LG C4 TV annoying brightness changes
SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".
I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.
I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.
Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.
Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.
LG does put some settings under poorly named menus such as “AI service”. But it sounds like some sort of slow scene adjustment. Maybe auto dynamic contrast?
I recommend using a guide from RTINGS to walk through all settings. They explain a lot and help you turn off all junk.
I would also recommend eliminating the app from the equation.
Seconding RTINGS. Their Settings page for that particular TV should be able to help you figure out what is causing the brightness changes, @kaffo.
And after a quick scan of that page it seems like it could be either the HDR, AI Brightness, Adjust Logo Brightness, Energy Saving, Dynamic Tone Mapping or even (as timo mentioned) the Auto Dynamic Contrast setting that could be the cause.
Edit: Looking at the LG 'Basic Picture Settings' troubleshooting doc, it could also be Motion Eye Care, which "automatically adjusts brightness and reduces image blur based on image data which reduces eyestrain". Or the Reduce Blue Light setting, which auto-adjusts the color temperature. Wow, LG has a LOT of auto-adjusting bullshit built into their TVs these days. :/ Supposedly enabling 'FILMMAKER MODE' turns all that shit off though, so that might be the way to go.
p.s. Please let us know if you solve it and how so that this topic can be tagged [Solved] for future reference. :)
Thanks for the RTINGS idea (and link @cfabbro) very useful for someone like me who's not really got any eye for screen configuration!
Didn't solve the issue though, but does make the picture look great!
I just got done setting up an LG OLED TV, but not the same one (mine is B4, reportedly dimmer with HDR than yours). Assuming you have energy saving off, ai brightness off, and the OLED care features off (especially logo dimming), you may be running into the mandatory ABL/ASBL, which limits brightness to extend the life of the screen. You can buy a service remote for about $10 to access the service menu and disable it (and similar things like GSR), but may void your warranty if a service technician checks the service log and wants to enforce that kind of idiocy. If you live somewhere with real consumer protections, you're not risking much. In the US, it's your gamble.
I have a dim TV room, so I leave the thing in Filmmaker mode with all "enhancements" in the menu turned off. I use syncler on a fire stick 4k max rather than stremio on webOS, and as long as the file I choose isn't a weird remux, all the HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and DTS work as intended. I leave the OLED brightness at 100 and get great color and picture at my preferred brightness (which is admittedly not close to maximum). With subtitles set to white, the brightness of the text is almost blinding by comparison to the picture, so I have adjusted that.
If you're okay with the max brightness you're seeing and can't stand the dimming, then I would consider doing the service menu override. Otherwise, I would consider exchanging for an LED-LCD screen. Until I figure out some settings that make basketball look right on the OLED, I actually prefer watching games on my much smaller LED.
Hope that helps
This is the right answer - the $10 service remote from Amazon works great, I've used it on two separate LG OLEDs to disable the auto dimming (ABL / ASBL).
Service remote seems like it might be the right call, I might get one and give it a blast in the long term. Thanks for the details that's actually really helpful!
Nice to see you're still running syncler after it failed a month ago. I jumped to stremio and haven't checked back yet. I prefer syncler and still have an active plus account so was hoping they'd figure it out sooner than later.
Did you have to reinstall everything? You ok stable or beta? Using provider repository? You can dm me if you'd prefer to answer there. Thanks!
Oh, yeah that was such a bummer! It was a debrid problem related to a copyright notice, and it resolved within a week or two. I changed nothing!
I still use the stable (v1?) with trakt, RD, and both Bouncy and jakedup-hybrid as providers. Once I read something about getting API keys or vendor provisioning for providers, I decided against trying the new version. My setup was complicated enough to get going.
I had this problem with a CX. I tried everything to fix it.
I ended up fixing it permanently by switching from LG's native apps, and using an NVIDIA Shield to do all of my streaming.
Honestly, any streaming box (Google, Apple TV 4K) will be better than LG's native apps. All sorts of weird glitches went away when I changed over. Plus, the apps for popular streaming boxes get far more development time and resources than WebOS, so you will no longer be waiting for six months for a new feature.
Sorry :( It means spending more money, but it was $150 at BestBuy well spent to make up for the hours and hours of searching, troubleshooting, and frustration.
So I used a 4k firestick for years now with my old Sony but I wanted to simply the setup to be honest and just run native.
I've plugged it back in and enabled Dolby Vision and the HDR on the output and I'm not getting the dumb flickering any more, so thanks! That's at least a short term solution.
I find it kinda crazy their native apps have issues like this, you'd think it'd be the other way around.
TV manufactures universally suck at software and ongoing maintenance (if they do any at all).
Any "smart" TV should be expected to be a dumb panel within a few years as the lack of updates mean the various online services gradually stop working.
If I could just buy a "dumb panel" I would, when I bought my last TV (Samsung) I decided to at least try the native apps ... I managed to crash my TV 3 times in the first day and just switched back to external devices.
You're probably the best for it anyway. I have one of these TVs and the EULA and privacy agreements necessary to use the "smart TV" functionality are obscene. I regularly go into the menus to make sure everything is disabled.
Occasionally a message will pop up trying to get me to accept the terms in order to turn on voice recognition or some BS. I hate it... I just want a quality display. My apple TV and PS5 supply all the functions I need.
Yeah true. After I bought the TV I realized that all the streaming video quality guides essentially suggest turning off all picture "features," adjusting values based on the rtings guide, and streaming from a good [edit]external[/edit] device, which should have better post-processing capabilities anyway. So I agree with the "treat it like a dumb panel" approach. They are REALLY nice panels.
I still use a fire stick 4k max but bought an Nvidia shield pro to set up instead. Evidently it's snappier and has better upscaling than most tvs.
Then again, I've also heard that the shield pro gives no real advantage over the native webOS apps you'd install directly to the TV. I'd still turn the picture "features" off to experience the basic signal, then decide which ones you like. It's all down to taste.
I picked up an LG C4 (
OLED65C4PUA
) a couple of months ago, myself, and I haven't noticed any issues during playback.I do play everything through a separate, dedicated box (the Google TV Streamer box) and won't use webOS.
However, I noticed that changing the system setting to have the OS automatically make everything HDR also makes normal screens—particularly those with UI elements—almost blindingly bright. So I think you might be on to something about the HDR/SDR thing (though I am not certain if that's technically possible within the same file).
Yeah as I mentioned to the other comment, I dug out the 4K firestick and it's fine. Just the native apos I suppose! Very odd, you'd think they'd work better than an external device!
I can't help you, but I find this interesting. I'm considering getting a C4. A lot of reviews say it's not as bright as Samsung S90D and some people need to tune the settings to make the C4 brighter to be good enough. So seeing the complaints here is giving me a different perspective.
I came from a 10 year old Sony and sometimes a cheap 4k projector and honestly it's pretty good.
I can't tell you it's brighter or the picture is more vivid or anything than a competitor but I can see it's better than what I had before.
The biggest bug bear is (as mention in above comments) there is a mountain of settings (in annoyingly laid out menus) to disable or tweak to make it look decent. Out the box all the energy saving and AI crap is on and it makes it look like dim junk.
If you end up adjusting settings often, you can hold down the settings button on the remote to go straight to picture settings! It's super useful if you ever need to adjust the OLED brightness or turn on eye-comfort mode at night.
That lines up with what I've read. I'm coming from a 13 year old Vizio Plasma, so I'm sure it looks way better than that.
My friend also warned me about WebOS. So I'll just have to use my Google TV stick. Which is a bit sad as I loved WebOS back when the Palm Pre first came out.
I see this is marked solved, but it seems like the solution was really just "use an external device" and not a real solution, is that correct?
Correct. I tried all the suggestions in this thread and nothing actually corrected it on native WebOS. However I would be keen to get a service remote (or surely you can get the ir code or something and flash it to a ir blaster?) to try at a later time.
I removed the [SOLVED] since it isn't actually solved quite yet, IMO. If you do end up getting a service remote, disabling ABL / ASBL, and that actually fixes it so you can keep using the native apps without the issue recurring, please let me know, @kaffo, so I can mark it solved again.
I understand your thinking here but I'd consider a partially solved or something alike?
At least for the immediate future I have no plan to try and fix the native app problem and I think it might be misleading to others seeing the title that it's still an active request.
Ah, okay. Fair enough. Re-added the Solved.
I posted this before going to bed last night (a sin on the Internet I know!)
But I am very happy to see all the replies, I'll go through them all later today and hopefully get a result.
Very much appreciated to everyone posting!
My first thought, having looked somewhat into different HDR standards relatively recently, is that it's using either HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, and something is going weird- both use more granular per-scene or even per-frame brightness / colour profile scaling as compared to the original HDR & HDR10 specs, and that might explain the semi-regular flip-flopping. Alternatively, mayhaps it's just hitting the brightness limit when the scene changes from dark to light, and dimming the display as a whole after a short period of time due to concerns about heat output or burn-in?
I'm afraid I'm no expert, but these are my initial thoughts about the problem. I hope you can get it sorted, and you can enjoy your shiny new screen!
Yeah that was along some of my thoughts too. But it being the native app it doesn't let you configure HDR at all or tells you when it switches. But on the external device on Dolby Vision it's totally fine.
have you disabled whatever it has for Dynamic Contrast or set it to 'low'?