CVBS / Composite / TV out in PAL on Allwinner A20 (cubieboard2)

  • Hi, I am trying to enable the composite out of the cubieboard2 under LibreELEC. Has anybody experience with that topic already? It still confuses me a bit.

    First, I read that u-boot supports composite out, which is disabled in the default u-boot kernel config. But by enabling those one would just be able to get composite out for the u-boot console, right? Or is the u-boot video-mode configuration somehow connected to the video output of the main kernel?

    Next, probably critical configuration is the dts file. In the 5.7 mainline kernel they are here. Interesting part is in the include here which lists framebuffer-lcd-tve0. Is this dts configuration already setup to enable composite out?

    Then, there is the video command line argument to setup the video output of the main kernel. But, where do those output strings (HDMI-1,VGA-1 ...) come from? Is it possible to retrieve a list of available outputs for the current video driver somehow?

    So far I tried for luck to set the kernel argument video=Composite-1:720x480 as was the config on the H3 (see below), but that didn't work. Sadly in that case dmesg didn't complain about the video argument not being applied.

    The status matrix for linux-sunxi lists a question mark for CVBS on A20, but it also states a no for the H3, though there seems to be working attempts to enable CVBS out on the H3 which raises my hopes for the A20.

    There, some changes to the dts were needed, but frankly I have no experience with dts configs, as such I would be very happy for any hints to get CVBS out working on the cubieboard2? :)

    best

    Martin

    Edited once, last by derMart (June 28, 2020 at 5:38 PM).

    • Official Post

    Well, thing is that there is A13 CVBS driver which might just work on A20, but I'm not sure anyone tested it on A20. U-Boot composite driver can in theory be used by Linux through simplefb mechanism (that framebuffer-lcd-tve0 node you noticed in DT) but it lacks features used by Kodi. Full blown DRM driver is needed for Kodi.

    I suggest you try to copy and fix CVBS pipeline related nodes from one of A13 DTs and see if that works.