GeeekPi 5 inch HDMI Monitor LCD Screen Problem

[Plopper]

I got this through the post yesterday.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01 ... UTF8&psc=1

And I have an odd problem. It's an 800x480 screen, but it will only show up on the Pi as 640x480 and the image is blocked to the left, so fills the screen except for a 2.5cm strip down the right hand side which is totally black.

There is no problem with the HDMI lead as I use it to go from my Pi to TV all the time, the screen is fine as I tried my PC through it and that was great.

The problem is that no matter what OS I try (I've tried several versions of Kodi, Raspbian and RetroPie) the screen remains the same, even the boot sequence of the Pi is blocked to the left!

Anybody have this screen with this problem and know a fix?

[DougieLawson]

What do you get from a tvservice -s; tvservice -m CEA; tvservice -m DMT command?

[Plopper]

Sorry I don't know what they are. Maybe I should have said that I'm a complete novice when it comes to the OS side of the Pi.

If you could please tell me how and where to type them commands into Raspbian I'll have a go.

[DougieLawson]

Run those commands from a LXTerminal or ssh command line and they'll tell you what modes your HDMI is using and what it's capable of running.

[Plopper]

OK tvservice -S reports;

state 0x120006 [DVI DMT (4) RGB full 4:3], 640x480 @60.00Hz, progressive

tvservice -m CEA says;

Group CEA has no modes:

tvservice -m DMT says;

Group DMT has one modes:

(prefer) mode 4: 640x480 @ 60Hz 4:3, clock: 25Hz progressive

[DougieLawson]

Then that's why it's running at 640x480, it's not capable of doing anything different. Have you been sold a pup by some con artist on Amazon? You may want to leave some snotty feedback.

Their website at http://wiki.52pi.com/index.php/5-Inch-8 ... SKU:Z-0053 claims you can encourage it to run at 800x480 with some /boot/config.txt settings.

[Plopper]

No as I said it it's not the screen as it works perfectly on the PC running at 800x480 and fills the screen.

I'll give them settings on their page a go, thanx for finding them for me.

[Plopper]

YAY that worked, I tried it editing the config file myself first and killed Raspbian.

Then tried it with their Github files and it worked!

Thanx so much for your help.

Oh! One thing that I was wondering following on from this. I want to use this screen for a simple music player running one of the Kodi variations installed as the sole OS. Would I still be able to run a terminal from them to alter the config file like I just did with the github files?

[DougieLawson]

Just install Kodi on whatever OS you've got running now.

[Plopper]

That is an option, but would I be able to make that boot straight into Kodi?

[DougieLawson]

That is an option, but would I be able to make that boot straight into Kodi?

Kodi is an application program, it's not an OS.

You get to choose between OSMC, OpenELEC, LibreELEC or Raspbian as the OS to host the Kodi application.

Stick with something you've got working until you have more experience with getting the drivers for your screen working.

Whatever you do go and buy a couple of spare 8GB (or bigger) SDCards so you can experiment.

[Plopper]

I've tried OpenELEC and liked it that was one of my options, but I didn't know that you could quite out of Kodi in that and return to a terminal! If you can I think that would be my best option?

Oh! And thanx for the tip on multiple SD cards!