OK, I can almost understand why you wouldn’t want to throw that away. Normally, I enjoy the challenge of getting older equipment working with OSMC, but my last 4:3 PAL-only display was dumped 20 years ago so I’ve nothing to test. I’m assuming the display is too old to have any concept of 16:9 aspect ratio or the various ways that have been devised to signal that. So can you confirm what you are seeing on the screen? You can expect the GUI interface to be squashed horizontally. OSMC only supports 16:9 and 21:9 aspect ratios. Then I would expect 4:3 videos to be displayed correctly and 16:9 videos to be squashed. Is that what you get? What do you get with Pi4 and LE? Some photos might help.
Well, you are surely stuck with that if you want to play, say, 1080p24Hz video on a PAL-only screen. The only question is which device is better at doing the conversion - Vero or the scan converter?
Regrettably we had to give up on that. AMlogic just don’t seem interested in supporting interlaced output properly with their 4.x kernels.
I think this is inevitable. We can’t overlay a GUI with one pixel aspect ratio on a video with a different pixel aspect ratio and expect evrything to line up. You would be better using a standard test card with a circle in it, such as the Philips one.
Correct. That’s the standard.
OSMC doesn’t ‘treat’ them at all. It just passes the signal to the display and leaves it to the display to sort out the aspect ratio. So you should see all the pixels in the image but only 4:3 video will be the correct a/r.
To do anything else, Vero would need to know what the aspect ratio of the screen is so it can scale 16:9 images vertically and add letterbox mattes. It could be that Pi is guessing that when the output is 576p the a/r is 4:3 but Vero is not.
I don’t think it will be easy to get automatic aspect ratio switching working for your setup but if you could provide more information and debug logs there is a chance.