RetroPi HDMI / AV composite video issues

Haemogoblin

A recently had need to try out RetroPi via AV (composite cable)
I'm using;
Raspberry Pi2B+ Overclocked to 1Ghz with 3 heats sinks, CPU, RAM, Video
16gb SD with RetroPi SD image

I enabled sdtv_mode=2 and hooked in my new 1.5m cable.
Prior to this I had setup my retropie using HDMI and everything worked fine. I setup a video splash screen to show on boot up, which also works fine. Emulation performance is also perfectly acceptable, though I did overclock to 1Ghz as I noticed a little slowdown in some games.

Booting up via AV, the video splash screen was visible slower, sound distorted and also slow. At a guess I would say playing at a quarter of normal speed.

Once in the GUI, performance seemed alright, audio slightly distorted. Loading a game, the performance was slower then on HDMI, but reacted to my input via controller at the same time as I pressed the direction buttons. Audio was again significantly slower than it should be.

I have checked out my AV cable on another RPi running the latest install of stretch, video playback is perfectly acceptable. So I can only assume this is something unique to the Retropi SD image.

I've asked on various Retropi groups but nobody seems able to explain why this is happening. So I'm hoping someone might have experience this issue.

Again, the cable HAS been tested on another RPi2B+ and video playback on a fresh install of Stretch is fine.

mitu

You're interchangeably using 'Stretch' and 'RetroPie', but you've not yet specified what does this mean - are you using Raspbian Strech + RetroPie on-top, or the RetroPie Strech based image (4.4) ? What RetroPie release are you using and how did you install it ? Can you post your /boot/config.txt file ?
The RetroPie image is based on stock Raspbian Lite, without any system modifications. Btw, did you mean '3B+' when you say '2B+' ?

sirhenrythe5th

@mitu he overclocked the CPU to 1GHz, so i guess he meant a 2B.

It's normal that Video splash screens slow down significant when using AV.
I did not have this issue with my ptevious build, but with the upgrade to stretch i had also to disable it and use a picture instead.

mitu

@Haemogoblin Check out these topics for some solutions to some similar problems