Arch Linux

filotek

Member

Registered: 2018-08-15

Posts: 23

Run audio over HDMI but turn off HDMI video?

I have speakers and a monitor connected to a KVM with the laptop connected to it via an HDMI cable.

I'm able to play audio over HDMI unless I disable HDMI via xrandr while working off the laptop screen exclusively.

I want to believe at some point I was able to pipe audio over HDMI with with video turned off, but it makes sense that if I turn off HDMI via xrandr, that the HDMI sinks would be disabled as well.

Is there a way to *enable* HDMI audio while disabling HDMI video?  The hack I've been using is to have both screens overlap each-other, then physically turn off the external display, but it presents with some sizing issues when both laptop screen and external display are of different sizes.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,307

Re: Run audio over HDMI but turn off HDMI video?

Set the screen brightness to the lowest possible value. Directly turning off video with DPMS and the like will likely completely cut the signal.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 59,084

Re: Run audio over HDMI but turn off HDMI video?

"pactl list sinks" w/ and w/o the output set "off" and also the tail of "sudo journalctl -f"?
Also please post your Xorg log, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#General

It's possible that the GPU driver (rather the kernel one) completely cuts the signal if there's no video, but that's not a necessity.

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