Black Screen - Push in the right direction.

  • Good day. Although I'm new to the forum I've been using various forms of Kodi/OSMC for a very long time. I'm been a Libreelec fan for maybe the last five years. Excellent work.

    I'm currently using RPi4. I've had good luck with Rpi's. I'm on Libreelec 11.0.3. I am NOT local to the RPi4 that is causing problems. I can only walk my friend through doing things.

    The unit was set up and running fine, but then they moved and now it's not. The TV is a Sony XBR-48A9S although we also tried it on another TV.

    The unit powers on, shows the text boot up screen but then goes dark and stays that way.

    When I installed the RPi4 it was my first work with a 4K TV. The movies showed in only a quarter of the screen. I changed something, I think in Libreelec, regarding screen resolution and got it working. I only mention this because perhaps that setting is causeing problems with a "regular" 1080p TV (IE the second TV we tried).

    Regardless of most anything. If I'm getting a black screen I can't work on it (or have it worked on).

    Question 1 - How can I work on this? A) is there a "safe boot" of some sort? B) I can SSH in but is there anything I can do via the SSH (or other remote access)?

    Question 2 - keeping Q1 in mind, any suggestions on how I go about troubleshooting this? I've always used the process of 1-connecting everything, 2- verifying TV is on the correct HDMI port, 3- power on the RPi4 and watch for the splash (DOS like... text) screen to verify connectivity. At least then I know the connectors are good. It passed that test, but now I'm stuck.

    Thanks in advance for any guidance. Just a quick shove in the right direction. Worse case is the US Mail, rebuild the box and start from scratch but then I still have to "remotely" connect it to a 4K TV (which I don't have here).

  • Code
    video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

    Force 1080p output by adding that ^ to kernel boot params in cmdline.txt (append to the same line NOT on a separate line). I'd also stop Kodi and rename /storage/.kodi/userdata/guisettings.xml then restart to reset GUI config to defaults.