[RPi5 2GB] Scrambled Display on Sony Bravia X90L

Hey, folks.

Please be patient with me as I barely pay attention to any of tech around TVs, variants of HDMI, variants of 4K/8K, etc. We are simple folks who just want to watch a digitized collection of our old movies.

I have a Bravia X90L series (55") and I just picked up a Pi5 CanaKit with all of the bells-and-whistles to double-sided tape a LibreELEC media center to the back of the TV over the fireplace. The version of LibreELEC is recent -- whatever came out of the business end of rpi-imager this afternoon.

I basically don't get a signal from the Pi5 at any of the HDMI ports with the exception of the highest-end HDMI-4 (4K and a bunch of whiz-bang I don't understand) port. At Pi boot I get the LibreELEC boot splash and then the attached not-quite-right display state. I can use the remote to navigate something as I can hear the UI element audio indications but I cannot see what I'm doing in the UI.

I've seen some posts about adjusting some display settings (ex: Deep Color) but I'm not finding them buried anywhere in the various menus of the Bravia.

Perhaps someone could take a look at the picture and point me in a possible direction?

thx

The Pi is sitting on a wooden shelf with the only nearby devices being a sound bar and the TV itself. I don't have a great way to test the interference hypothesis but I think it is ruled out by some other tests.

I wrote RPIOS to the same SD card and booted that attached to the screen. It was able to negotiate a signal with the TV without a problem though I did forget to check if it was 4k. I guess perhaps I will go back and check that later.

As a final set of steps I wrote LibreELEC to the SD card with two different card readers and in both cases the boot results in the corrupted screen scenario I first posted.

So not entirely sure how to proceed. I will go check for 4k with RPIOS and I will see if I can any information about how "Deep Color" might translate to the Bravia settings.

Quote from HarryH

Do you use a RPi5 2GiB model? I can remember that you should use a current LE nightly to support that. I think the scrambled picture looks so...

Post

RE: [RPi5 2GB] GUI shows no text, only background pictures

[…]

We mark our builds as "stable" or "nightly". You need latest "nightly" for RPi5 2GB:

https://test.libreelec.tv/

Da Flex

October 4, 2024 at 12:28 AM

Mine is actually an 8GB. But perhaps the issue is not a function of amount of memory but something else?

Well, shoot. I just tried the nightly and got the same results as to the corrupted display. I have a PiKVM bouncing around here. Does LibreELEC boot include a serial console? If so, I suppose I could tap into my Pi and get some debugging information.

On a related note, I'm not married to the Pi5. There are plenty of things I could do with it other than use it as a media node. Is there another set of kit that works well with LibreELEC and has a similar form factor? I have tons of solar on the house so I'm not super concerned about if another set of kit uses a bit more power. I don't really want to go down the route of a SFF because I'm limited for space in this particular location.

There's a timer on my ability to post so rather than respond to folks with quotes I'll have to roll everything up in a single post...

HarryH Wow, that was buried in the menus! You must have either a photog memory or a Bravia. As it turns, that setting was already enabled.

chewitt This corruption is happening at first boot. I'll look to see if there is a single user mode or some way to pause the boot loader to see if I can add those troubleshooting options. Thx. Stand by.

Hmm...

I added the video= line but I'm still getting the same corrupted video.

I also added "ssh" to the end(?) of config.txt but no sshd running:

Host is up (0.00026s latency).
Not shown: 997 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT    STATE SERVICE
111/tcp open  rpcbind
139/tcp open  netbios-ssn
445/tcp open  microsoft-ds

I couldn't find anything on the wiki, SEs, or via LLM that suggested I needed anything fancier than just appending as the last line of the file.

I plugged the Pi into an low-end Dell 27" monitor just for kicks. Same result. Also swapped cables and tried both the stable and nightly builds. Also same results.

Seems like there is some sort of problem with Pi5. Or at least *my* Pi5.

Quote from HarryH

You must add both boot parameters to cmdline.txt not config.txt !

Y, sorry. That's the file I modded: cmdline.txt.

Y, too many windows open. I mounted the .img file to do some inspection and accidentally modded it rather than the SD card I had just written and mounted. I have SSH now though.

https://paste.libreelec.tv/evident-shark.log

After setting the video=... and rebooting I tried both HDMI-4 and HDMI-1 on the Bravia and toggled the Enhanced Format to see if that would resolve. Nothing so far. Same result.

I'm going to try the Dell monitor next but there's no wired network over there so...