Is it possible to set the Raspberry Pi's touchscreen as the video output and HDMI as the audio output? My situation is that I have my Pi acting as a network music streaming device connected to my stereo with no TV which is why I use the touchscreen. My receiver has HDMI inputs which I'd like to use for audio. When I connect an HDMI cable no video shows on the touchscreen.
[RPi4] HDMI Audio with Touchscreen
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baldrick -
October 19, 2025 at 9:10 PM -
Thread is Resolved
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Which hardware do you use (RPi and touchscreen)?
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Thanks. I don't think it's possible that way, because HDMI connection will always add video. Buy a USB sound card or audio interface,
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This is not possible in LE images as the HDMI connection is active and HDMI cannot be audio-only, so even if the DSI connector to the touchscreen is also active the output plane detection logic in Kodi finds and prefers the HDMI connection. If HDMI output is not active then Kodi finds the DSI connection and uses that instead. You cannot disable the video output part of the DRM connector without also disabling audio as they are interdependent.
The two routes to making it work that you can explore (depending on skill levels) are hacking Kodi source to change the DRM plane detection logic, or perhaps building a custom image that runs Kodi under GBM/Wayland instead of GBM-only (or using RPiOS that does this). Running Kodi under a windowing environment should give you the option to switch the display output device. LE does not run Kodi under Wayland as it has no ability to switch/adjust refresh rates on-the-fly to match the media refresh-rate, but you won't have that option with the touchscreen anyway so it's not the dealbreaker it is with HDMI connections. We have Wayland support in our buildsystem as this is used by the Lakka retro-gaming fork to run their GUI, so you should be able to build a custom image.
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GBM connector can be forced via advancedsettings.xml.
First ssh in and use kmsprint to get the connected connector name of the screen.
Create advancedsettings.xml (replace "Virtual-1" with your connector name):
Code: /storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml
Display More<advancedsettings version="1.0"> <!-- Debug Logging --> <loglevel hide="false">1</loglevel> <!-- No monitor selection on GBM but connector can be forced: --> <videoscreen> <monitor>Virtual-1</monitor> </videoscreen> </advancedsettings>Debug logging is enabled to ease the setup.
Perform systemctl restart kodi to test the configuration.
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Wow, showcase! Consider to install MPD with DSD for super premium experience:
Raspberry Pi 4 + LibreElec + Music Player Daemon + WavPack DSD
Hello!
I installed LibreElec 9.95.1 and mpd (as service addon) and found that when playing WavPack DSD files with a samplerate of more than 384 kHz, the sound is very interrupted. A search on the Internet did not give anything, the mpd settings also did not bring any result. And then I accidentally looked into:
mpd -V
— and found that it was built without native support for the WavPack format, that is, it decodes it using ffmpeg. And ffmpeg DOES NOT RECOGNIZE DSD compressed with WavPack.
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