TV Ambilight project, Slow video, choppy and low FPS on TV

Good day,

I've built my ambilight project following this (TV AMbient light with Raspberry Pi and Hyperbion) instructions.

Once I finished assembling everything, nothing worked .

However, thanks to the information on this forum (special thanks to Lightning-guy77) I got the thing running.

Although running, sometimes the video starts being very very slow, not possible to watch TV like this. When this happens, NETFLIX for example won't even work.

"having trouble accessing titles right now".

I checked the live feed on the "LED Visualization" menu in the hyperion web access (@IP:8090) and the video captured is also slow in the live video.

I've tried most of the solutions present in this forum (maybe I've missed one?) But I'm fearing that it might be a hardware related problem???

My hardware is:

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• WS2812B LED Strip
• Power Supply Adapter DC5V 10A
• Rullz (Aliexpress) 4K 60Hz HDMI Video Capture Card TV Loop 1080P (USB 2.0)

From the config side, I have

• config.txt:
  • arm_freq=750
  • turbo_??=1
  • max_usb_power=1
• Hiperbion
  • Size decimation: 8
  • Device Resolution: 640x480 (minimum available)
  • FPS: 20 (lowering this value did not solve things)

Any help would be extremely welcomed. If there's any other thing I should share please let me know

Thank you very much in advance,

Ok, but it doesn't happen all the time. And will this affect the speed at which the video is shown??

Zitat von pclin

Rullz (Aliexpress) 4K 60Hz HDMI Video Capture Card TV Loop 1080P (USB 2.0)

Yes, this could easily be the case. It was quite cheap. What bothers me a bit is that sometimes work, sometimes doesn't. I will write them to ask. Anyone has a recommended video capture card that I could use as replacement in my current setup.

Zitat von Lightning-guy77

(If not 5.3 volts its stuck on 600Mhz wether you change the config.txt doesnt matter then)

This is quite interesting. I will test your other recomendations, and if all fails, I will try OC the PI card while supplying it with 5.3V.

If all fails, I will blame the video capture card.

Thank you for the useful answers!!

Thanks for the help pclin.

So if I understand correctly; I should use a splitter. One output of the splitter to the hdmi with loop (leaving the output unused), and the second output would go directly to the TV. Is this right?

If so, would this do the work?

Thank you very much!

Zitat von Lightning-guy77

What will help sometimes is changing the videostream format.

Also lower the FPS (15 Fps) and decrease the size decimation (between 4 and 12)

you can run the PI easily on Arm 900Mhz

But only when the PI runs on 5.3volts

None of this worked. I could increase a bit the voltage (although not to 5.3volts) and OC the Pi. There's a command to read how fast the CPU is running (live) and this value was 900'000'000 hz. so I recon the OC is working. Still the video lags a bit. Tried the other configs, also still lags

Ok, just bought a HDMI Splitter. If I only use 1 output of the splitter (directly to the TV), I can see with no problems. If I then connect the ambilight project on the 2nd output, video is choppy again. I don't understand why output 2 would affect output 1... shouldn't just the lights lag if the grabber isn't fast enough??!!

Also, could it be the TV box the problem? (the video signal comes from the providers TV Box).

Thanks for the continuos help.

Zitat von Lightning-guy77

Pi2 zero is single core

I have the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which I think is quad-core: With a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1GHz and 512MB of SDRAM

The splitter doesn't have any option on this. I think I read it was only copy, cant find that now.

I bought this one