Activate HDMI for Video output on LCD monitor

1st Official Post

    I have installed the latest LibreElec release (9.2.3) on my Raspberry PI 3B+ and would like to configure the HDMI output to be used as default for playing videos. Can anybody provide some help?

    By the way, what is the video player used by LibreElec? OMXPlayer?

    Hi chewitt, thanks for your reply. I have a PI3B+ with an attached USB card. The Audio streaming via Airplay works fine. When however playing a movie it is shown via the attached default LCD screen (via Ribbon) and not the monitor connected to the HDMI cable!

    When navigating in the Kodi GUI to Seetings --> System --> Display I cannot change the output. It seems locked to the default lcd screen (see screenshot below).

    Is there a dedicated config file where one can activate the HDMI to become visible by Kodi?

    • Official Post

    Ahh, the original Q is now clearer. If you have two screens attached (LCD via ribbon, TV via HDMI) Kodi will use the first one probed by the kernel, and on ARM hardware Kodi does not support multiple screens output (maybe in the future, but not today). So to redirect output to HDMI, you either need to disconnect the LCD, or perhaps fiddle with config.txt and disable in software; I'm not sure as config.txt options are not my area of expertise.

    Hi chewitt, I have another Raspberry Buster installation setup with omxplayer installed. With this player it is possible to launch from the Desktop shown on the LCD screen any movie file and redirect it to be played on the HDMI connected monitor. Hence I have the lcd display always visible to navigate and interact with the raspberry desktop and at the same time the monitor playing the movie. This setup is inteded for my VW Bus. I was wondering if it would not be possibe to install omxplayer in addition to Kodi and add a dedicated button or link inside to run the omxplayer. As I understood this could be done via the xml config files which would support all required execution parameters. If you think this could work would you by any chance have an example plugin I could use as a template to implement?

    • Official Post

    Raspberry Pi OS uses X11 windowing and since it's a desktop OS there is support for multiple screen output and multiple player apps. LE runs a single app (Kodi) directly on the framebuffer so there is no windowing and we support a single HDMI connection. LE is more lightweight so will boot faster, but if you need multi-screen output and other apps, we're the wrong distro. NB: LE 9.2 still supports the original OMXplayer decoding, but MMAL will give better results over a wider range of media and is the default on 3B+ hardware. Kodi v19 dropped support for OMXplayer so it will not be present in LE10, but it will be superseded with GBM/V4L2 decoding, although this is still in development.