Using the 2nd Display as the Main Display for Kodi on Your Laptop

Good day to you all,

I'm here to ask if any of you knows how to force Kodi to launch on the 2nd display or how to use the 2nd display as the main display. Currently, I'm using an HP Pavilion G4 with an AMD A6-4400M APU with Radeon™ HD Graphics. I had to boot it off of a USB flash drive since the HDD recently died, but this is just a temporary solution, so please bear with me.

If anyone has experience or knowledge regarding configuring Kodi to use the 2nd display or setting it as the primary display, I would greatly appreciate your guidance. Thank you in advance for your help!

Quote from chewitt

Code

video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

^ Adding this to kernel boot params (the APPEND line in syslinux.cfg) forces the video output to the HDMI-A-1 adapter. Set this if wanting to use HDMI and not the internal screen (LVDS) or change the adapter details to suit the second HDMI device and it will be used, else the kernel will detect/use the first device probed (on a laptop, normally the LVDS connection). You can also use content like "video=HDMI-A-1:d" to disable the HDMI-A-1 device (allowing another to be discovered) .. whichever works is good. There is no F7 style hotkey to swap outputs once Kodi has started.

So, I managed to add the line:

video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60

to /flash/syslinux.cfg by remounting the /flash partition in read-write mode. However, after rebooting, I still get Kodi on the internal screen instead of the HDMI. Did I do something wrong? I would like to know!

Quote from Da Flex

Nah, append that line right after vga= current at LABEL live section.

I added video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080M@60 after vga=current.

Quote from mglae

You have to disable the video output you don't want ( chewitt already mentioned it).

Use ls /sys/class/drm to get the correct LVDS name and use video={lvds name}:d.

Usually it is video=LVDS-1:d or video=eDP-1:d

I have this output from the command line:

Revisory:~ # ls /sys/class/drm
card0           card0-LVDS-1    renderD128
card0-HDMI-A-1  card0-VGA-1     version

I want to ask if I should add video=card0-LVDS-1:d or video=LVDS-1:d. Additionally, if I do so, should I add it to LABEL live and LABEL run as suggested by @19921-da-flex (I'm not sure how to use the mention function)?

Quote from mglae

a) Add video=LVDS-1:d

b) With DEFAULT run in syslinux.cfg use "run". You can check the kernel parameters with cat /proc/cmdline

This is what I did yesterday:

And surprisingly, it works, and now the screen is on the HDMI. Anyways, thanks for the support!