Raspberry Pi 4 rev. 1.4 with Kodi at 480i

    Hi there!

    I have a ton of DVDs that never came out in HD that I want to watch on my CRT. I ripped them all to ISO and I have been looking for a media player capable of playing ISOs (not .mp4 files only) in their native 480i resolution thru component outputs. Of course, all the options for media players that achieve this (WDTV+, etc.) are very old, so I got a RPi4 and it has been very complicated to getting right.

    I got a RPi4 with 2 GB of RAM and an HDMI to Component converter by Portta. I tried installing LibreElec on it to use Kodi (which plays DVD’s .ISO fine) but it seems that there are several issues with it:

    LibreElec 10.0 is the one that works for R4pi, BUT it seems that the command to force HDMI to output 480i does not work. Before you just had to add these lines to the confing.txt, but with LibreElec 10.0 now you have to use cmdline.txt but it seems that the 480i output is not being detected anyway. So you have to use the older 9.2 for the RPi4 to correctly boot in 480i.

    Thread

    480i on LibreELEC 10

    Hi, I'm currently stuck on 9.2 because 10.0 uses a different way of setting modelines which hasn't been working out for me. My usecase is connecting to a SD CRT TV so I need my Pi to output 640x480i. In 9.2 that's just a matter of setting hdmi_group and hdmi_mode appropriately, but from what I gather, 10.0 requires setting the output in cmdline.txt. I tried adding video=HDMI-1:640x480@60iD to the end of the line in cmdline.txt but no video signal comes across that is recognized by the CRT. Help…
    millysoose
    April 26, 2022 at 4:46 AM

    But... I can’t install an older LibreElec 9.2 (that is able to use the config.txt full code) cause it seems that revision 1.4 of the RPi4 2GB does not allow it. I tried doing a cheat to install 9.2 by copying and replacing the following files (bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb, start.elf and fixup.dat from the 10.0 release to the 9.2 boot partition) but it did not also work. The RPi4 displays a black screen.

    Thread

    LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-9.2.8.img

    I could not install LibreELEC-RPi4.arm-9.2.8.img on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B - 2GB.

    It informs me that "Start.elf: is not compatible.

    This board requires newer software. It does not allow me to install Kodi 9.

    Do you have any solution for this problem?

    Thank you for your attention
    Matmi
    April 5, 2022 at 11:26 AM

    9.2.6 won't boot on Pi 4 (fresh install, frozen on black screen with white _ symbol)>em class="_7s4syPYtk5hfUIjySXcRE">

    Has anyone managed to get Kodi (and videos, not just the GUI or menu) running at 480i on a Raspberry Pi 4 rev. 1.4 with LibreElec 10.0 or 9.2?

    Thank you for your time.

    Also worth adding that Kodi has never really been optimised for 'interlaced in, interlaced out' replay - as preserving field order, field dominance etc. is tricky and now a pretty niche requirement.

    If you configure Kodi on any platform for 480i output, and play 480i source files, chances are you'll be deinterlacing 480i to 480p and then reinterlacing to 480i for output - rather than preserving 480i. This may be fine for your use case - but a 480i 'straight through' workflow is not straightforward.

    Yeah, this is rare stuff. There is a composite bug in LE 10.0.2, so I think that's the whole reason of the issue.

    Generally it should be possible to run 480i by those settings: Click!

    Thank you for your answers. Unfortunately I could not make it work with the R4Pi. I got a R3Pi 3B+ to see if I can pull it out with it. But after reading that Kodi may be deinterlacing 480i to 480p and then reinterlacing to 480i for output, I am not so sure.

    Quote from noggin

    If you configure Kodi on any platform for 480i output, and play 480i source files, chances are you'll be deinterlacing 480i to 480p and then reinterlacing to 480i for output - rather than preserving 480i. This may be fine for your use case - but a 480i 'straight through' workflow is not straightforward.

    I appreciate your help.

    To my knowledge RPi can't output real interlaced video. I just don't see why this should matter. We have a couple of RPi users, who run CRT TV's successfully with such fake interlaced modes. This definitely works. Just make sure you run the right LE version (see above).

    Kodi always outputs progressive, so if you have PAL 576i@25Hz media it will be converted to 576p@50Hz by rendering each interlaced half-frame to one progressive frame and your output device should support 50Hz modes. I'm not entirely sure what then happens in the kernel DRM layer if you force the output to an interlaced device, but I'd assume it must be converted and I'd expect 576i@50Hz to be the result not 25Hz as I doubt the DRM layer is configurable or smart enough to detect the progressive output could be (re)packed into 25Hz.

    NB: These days Kodi is written around the assumption the GUI is always 720p or greater, so while you can get output on a lower resolution display, the GUI layout and will not be optimal.