The VideoLAN Forums

I have seen this question (or a similar one) asked many times in different places, but none of my attempts have worked thus far.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4B attached to two monitors via HDMI.

I would like to be able to issue a shell command (over ssh) to launch a full screen video on both monitors.

I can successfully launch full screen video on monitor 1, but NOT on monitor 2.

I will NOT have access to the mouse and keyboard, so this all has to be done via the command line.

The command I am using to launch fullscreen video on monitor 1 is this:

DISPLAY=:0 cvlc movies/Thunderstorm.mov --video-filter='transform{type=270}' --fullscreen --no-video-title-show

(The transform filter is being used because the monitor is in portrait mode.)

My question: how can I use this command to launch the fullscreen video on monitor 2?

I admit that I am mostly clueless with regards to VLC.

What I have tried thus far (and did NOT work):

• DISPLAY=:1

• DISPLAY=:0.1

• --qt-fullscreen-screennumber 1

• --drm-vout-display HDMI-2

DISPLAY=:1 will select the second X11 display server, which most likely does not exist.

DISPLAY=:0.1 will select the second "screen" of the first X11 display server. Each screen is an independent root window. In real life, X11 servers only ever have on screen (number 0) and multiple view ports are managed with RandR. So also unsurprising that it does not work.

--qt-fullscreen-screennumber=1 should select the second RandR viewport if the VLC Qt GUI and normal/default embedded video playback is in use. That would be the default with upstream VLC and most Linux distros.

However, since you mention an option "--drm-vout-display" that does not and never has existed as a VLC option, I guess that you are using the Raspbian fork of VLC. So then, the Qt option will indeed probably not work. We can only advise to use upstream VLC (or plain Debian/Ubuntu). Otherwise please seek support from Raspbian.