Display mode switching issue on Raspberry Pi 5

[itsatlasgroupcz]

I’m running Anthias (latest version) on Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Bookworm), installed via the official Docker method.

My setup:

Raspberry Pi 5 connected via HDMI to a 4K TV

Issue:
Whenever there is a transition from an image to a video or from a video back to an image, the TV displays an OSD message in the top-right corner indicating an input mode switch (e.g., “VIDEOCORE 1920x1080”).

Observations:

This issue does not occur when the Raspberry Pi is connected to a native 1080p monitor or TV.
I attempted to force the resolution by adding:

video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60 video=HDMI-A-2:1920x1080@60
to /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt, but it did not help.
When I force 4K resolution both in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt and in ~/.screenly/screenly.conf, the OSD message no longer appears. However, this requires using 4K videos.

Limitation:
I cannot use 4K videos because hardware acceleration on Raspberry Pi 5 is not working properly, and playback stutters (see related issue: #2612).

Question:
Is there a way to prevent the HDMI mode switching (and the resulting OSD message) while staying at 1080p output? Any recommended configuration or workaround would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,
Tomas

[nicomiguelino]

@itsatlasgroupcz, I'm currently looking on this. I'll keep you posted.

[nicomiguelino]

@itsatlasgroupcz Thanks for the detailed report!

We're looking into whether switching to a different media player on Pi 5 would help with the OSD issue.

The root cause is that Anthias currently uses separate display pipelines for images/web pages and videos, and the transition between them can trigger a modeset event that some TVs interpret as a signal change.

A proper fix would require unifying those pipelines, which is something we're considering for a future update.

We'll keep this thread posted on any progress.

[nicomiguelino]

I recently made changes to Anthias.

To update Anthias, run the same command that you used to install it:

$ bash <(curl -sL https://install-anthias.srly.io)

Please let me know if you're still having issues after the update.

[itsatlasgroupcz]

@nicomiguelino

I’ve updated Anthias to the latest master branch using the installation command you provided. The changes resolve biggest of the issues: the modeset event (OSD message) no longer appears when switching between images and videos, and overall the playback feels much smoother. This is great, thank you!

Regarding video playback:

4K videos still stutter even when using mpv. It’s slightly better than with ffplay, but CPU usage is still above 90%.
Full HD videos run smoothly with CPU usage around 70–80%.

It seems that video acceleration is still not working, or perhaps I’m missing something? Regardless, in this state everything is much more usable for our needs.

Thanks again for the improvements!

[nicomiguelino]

@itsatlasgroupcz, I'm glad that there are improvements even though it's not that much. Thanks!