Troubleshooting • Bookworm - Console View - unable to get interlaced output

Hi All
I have made some video players on Raspberry Pis for a large broadcaster.

They run Raspbian, traditionally the lite install, so no Wayland or X11 environment.

Our internal infrastructure is a strict 1920 x 1080 50 i environment, and I am really struggling to set Bookworm to output interlaced pictures at console level.

I can set the start up splash to be 1080 50i in /boot/firmware/config.txt with (which on older OS releases was the way to set the output in console too):The broadcast monitor by my desk picks that up as 1080 50i

But then when the console loads, it changes to Progressive (1080 50P)

And the docs suggest that if I edit /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt I can add the string:the i bit of the 50ie in theory making the output interlaced, but it appears to not work
The other bits of that string do stuff, before adding the 1920x1080 bit the monitor was detecting 720P, and with the resolution set, but without the @50 bit, it was picking up 1080 60P so I can see that bits of it work.
But just frustratingly not interlaced images.

Loading an environment like Wayland, the OSes tool for setting resolution allows you to set interlaced in there, and the monitor detects that correctly so I am certain this is not a hardware limitation.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/modedb.txt suggests that interlaced should work, am I missing something?

Thanks in advance
Andy

Statistics: Posted by AndyTij — Fri Jun 13, 2025 10:13 am

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