For some reason my TV is cutting off about 4 or 5 characters from the screen of my Raspberry Pi. I am using Raspbian, but it occurred with Arch as well.

Could it be that I have an HDMI to Component converter? Is there a way to adjust the terminal to the right?


I expect that the issue is that your Raspberry Pi is using different resolution to your TV.

The resolution can be changed manually by editing the Raspberry Pi config file which is located at /boot/config.txt

You must enter an hdmi_group and hdmi_mode in that file in order to set the resolution. The values that correspond to the resolution you want can be found half way down this wiki page.

For example:


Would give you a resolution of 1280x1024 at 60Hz


Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA-861B) refers to a CEA/EIA standard which consists of display timing and formats supported by Digital Televisions


Display Monitor Timings (DMT) are a list of VESA standard pre-defined timings which are commonly used within the Computer industry.

This leads me to believe that CEA (hdmi_group=1) should be used for televisions. Whereas DMT (hdmi_group=2) should be for computer monitors.

  • Sorry about the delay. What's the difference between CEA and DMT? – VinylScratch Sep 15 '12 at 1:18
  • @VinylScratch I'm not 100% sure, but I believe they are just different standards of specifying resolution. I'll add a note at the bottom of the answer. – Jivings Sep 15 '12 at 9:34
  • In fact, I think I'll add that to the wiki. – Jivings Sep 15 '12 at 16:37
  • I just found out that my boot folder is empty. – VinylScratch Sep 19 '12 at 20:49
  • @VinylScratch: It's probably just not mounted. You'll need to mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 to /boot/ – Jivings Sep 20 '12 at 6:20

Sorry to react almost 7 years later... I believe this problem could be related and solved to overscan.

Either set your TV to display every pixels without cutting the border. Or, on the Pi specify that some pixels are not visible and should not be used. And this can be done in /boot/config.txt

# and your display can output without overscan


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