I get that you’d want to put some roadblocks to keep people from turning it on when they are better served by having passthrough audio working. It should definitely be off by default and a warning/disclaimer attached to it.
It’s an old tube TV (Sony “The Cube” PVM-2730QM) and it supports both 15 kHz standards. 480i 60 Hz (American broadcast standard) and 576i 50 Hz (Europe broadcast standard). It’s a European model so it has a SCART connector and accepts RGB, Composite, and S-Video signals.
The video scan converter is there to take the progressive 480p or 576p VGA 31 kHz RGB signals down to a 480i or 576i 15 kHz interlaced RGB signal.
Technically I can feed it pretty much any VGA signal up to 1600*1200 and with higher refresh rates but the output to the TV will always be 480i60 or 576i50 so I want to avoid scaling and framerate conversions.
If I could get the Vero 4K to output a 480i or 576i signal that would be ideal and I could skip the scan converter altogether but haven’t been able to do that. I have tried with both “576i50” and “576cvbs” in the disp_cap file but neither gives me a picture. I have tried hooking the VGA adapter and scan converter to a VHS/DVD-combo unit that outputs 576i over HDMI and verified that it works. The converter detects a 15 kHz signal… and yeah there actually are a few VCRs with HDMI outputs!
“Display 4:3 videos” only determines what zoom mode to use for 4:3 videos. It doesn’t tell Kodi the shape of the pixels of the display. I was able to adjust it manually. It’s a bit of a hassle tho and when the square in the calibration screen is square the video aspect is still off so kind of have to do it from the player with a video playing in the background. Basically playing a 4:3 video and changing the pixel shape until the picture stops growing and starts shrinking and you know it’s filling both width and height.
So there seems to be some mismatch in the logic behind that calibration screen as well. Again this works great on the Raspberry Pi with LibreELEC.
I haven’t been able to add the resolutions to OSMC on the Raspberry Pi however so haven’t been able to test there.
The resolutions you get when you add 576p50 and 480p60 into disp_cap are actually 720576 and 720480 I suspect. Which do not have square pixels. This is some terrible leftover from the DVD specs I think. 720*576 for instance has a ratio of 5:4 but aspect of 4:3 or 16:9. And as I said in the beginning OSMC appears to treat them both as 16:9 aspect as without adjusting pixel shape 16:9 content seems to fill the screen.
In the HDMI standards I believe that there might be separate resolutions for 4:3 and 16:9 SD resolutions?
When configuring a Raspberry Pi for instance you have hdmi_group=1 (CEA) for TV resolutions and hdmi_mode=17 is 576p 50Hz 4:3 and hdmi_mode=18 is 576p 50 Hz 16:9. Both of these are still 720*576 pixels. That distinction could just be something in the graphics stack of the Raspberry Pi tho. Not sure.