I finally got my Pi to display on an old TV, via the RCA connector. Unfortunately, the Pi outputs a picture that is bigger than the TV can display. It does this on both the TV pictured here:
and a newer (though still pretty old) flatscreen we have, so it probably isn't the TV.
All the fixes I find for this problem I can find are specific to HDMI overscan, and none of them have fixed this. I just can't seem to find someone who has had this same problem with the RCA connection.
I have two old TVs that I got to work using the composite connection. Both were fixed by adjusting the overscan settings. On the older, smaller TV, setting overscan_left, overscan_right, overscan_top and overscan_bottom along with adjusting framebuffer_width and framebuffer_height did the trick. I have the NOOBS SD card and used Linux running in VirtualBox on a Windows 7 box to edit the config.txt file. For the second TV, setting the four overscan values and framebuffer sizes did not make any difference. Eventually I found a reference to overscan_scale=1 and tried that and everything started working. I was able to change these values in two ways in RASPBMC, one using ssh to login to a running system and edit /boot/config.txt and the other was to add them in the System Configuration page under "PROGRAMS". Using ssh was much easier if you have access that way.
overscan_scale=1 ? I have searched without success.
Commented
Apr 26, 2014 at 2:32
Look at http://elinux.org/R-Pi_ConfigurationFile which describes the settings in /boot/config.txt. I believe these should work for composite video (but I haven't used this).
The overscan can be set using sudo raspi-config Advanced Options.
You can also configure with /opt/vc/bin/tvservice
/opt/vc/bin/tvservice -s will display current settings
/opt/vc/bin/tvservice -c "PAL 4:3" will set the aspect ratio (which I think defaults to 5:4).
As it turns out, there are two places in the config.txt that have overscan options if you use NOOBS to install. So, if you are having a similar problem, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the file and are certain that overscan is set properly there.