[contadino]

Hi there,
short question at the community - how do you handle pipewire?

Until the last Lubuntu-upgrade to 23.04 i left pulseaudio deinstalled and had no difficulties with the sound in Kodi. With the upgrade pipewire was added to the system and it seems, there is no possibility to get rid of it.
As far as Kodi 20 is not ready to handle Pipewire, i see now some combinations between Pipewire and Pulseaudio in the Kodi Audio menu. Which are all not functional.   The HDMI-port needed does not show up any more.

Well, i did some search in the www then and found a solution - i have to force Kodi to work with Alsa, to bring it back to normal behaviour again.
So i start Kodi now in the console-window with the following command:
env KODI_AE_SINK=ALSA kodi
At first it seemed to work properly, but in reality Kodi is not really stable any more, when i start it this way.

So my question:
Which is the best way, to start Kodi 20 in Alsa-mode?
Thanks in advance!

PS: I don't want to use the Kodi 21 alpha version!

[heysoundude]

You have it half backwards: it's not which kodi version you should use, it's which *buntu you should be running.
lubuntu 22.04 will (If I'm reading you right) probably make everything good with kodi 20...I believe kodi 21 will be ready for pipewire and/or wayland etc by the time *buntu 24.04 drops.  a year or less from now.

[fritsch]

Real pipewire support including passthrough and such was only added to kodi after v20 was released. For best pipewire support, use a nightly.

[contadino]

Thanks for the answers...   which do not make me very happy.

Yes, i do know now, that it was a mistake to upgrade Lubuntu from 22.10 to 23.04. Because of PipeWire, which seems impossible to be deinstalled.
Downgrading Lubuntu from 23.04 to 22.04/22.10 doesn't look very promising.
Wipe away the system and setting up a new Lubuntu is also not a good alternative - it was a lot of work to bring the system in a real good working condition.

So i think, i will have to use the Kodi alpha or nightly version, but to be honest - thats not really what i am dreaming of.

Isn't there a switch inside Kodi 20 to let it use PipeWire-Alsa instead of Pipewire-Pulseaudio? In the advancedsettings or somewhere else?
In principle the system works, when i start it with the mentioned command. But when i put the PC to sleep and reawake it, all audio is gone...

Edit:
Would you say Kodi 21 alpha is stable for standard use?

[wsnipex]

KODI_AE_SINK=ALSA  should work. What exactly do you mean with "kodi is not stable anymore"? Logs?

[contadino]

Thanks for the answer!

But where do i put this line? The command to start Kodi  env KODI_AE_SINK=ALSA kodi  seems to work sometimes and sometimes not.
I can provide logs, but i am not sure, if it will help somebody - it is clear, whats the problem here, isn't it?
With strange behaviour i mean following:

much too loud and strange system-sounds
much too quiet movie-sound
film freeze after ca. 3 seconds
absolutly no sound
pointless settings in the audio-menu
Kodi itself freeze and it is necessary to push the hardware power button for 5 seconds...

All of this not every time and in different combinations. Kind of entertaining...

[igs165]

Thanks to this thread my sound problem are gone.

I was using normal ALSA - Pulseaudio configuration for many years. At one point in time these sound problems came up. First sporadic later permanent.

The main symptom was that the volume was different at every reboot. Sometime the sound was very quiet even at full volume. I tried to fix it with command line mixer tools before starting Kodi. I can't say why the problems were gone for several months. Last week the problems came back when I changed the hardware.

I started a new analyzing session and found out, that the Pulseaudio command line tools were working on my account but not on the Kodi account. This led me to look at the Pulseaudio-Deamon and I found out, that there were no Pulseaudio-Deamons but two "pipewire-pulseaudio" deamons running one under my account and one under the kodi account. Never before I had heard anything about PipeWire and that directed me here.

The solution war simple for me: apt purge pipewire fixed the problem once and for all. It took many other packages with it but Kodi was not negative affected. It works fine now and all sound problems are gone.

[fritsch]

Kodi's upcoming version 21 should have top quality pipewire native support with all profiles supported.

[igs165]

Kodi's upcoming version 21 should have top quality pipewire native support with all profiles supported.

I'm running the last nightly of version 21 (ok, it is 8 months old) and it't not working good there. For me it looks like that not Kodi is the problem but this "pulseaudio-pipewire" thing. So even if Kodi has full native pipewire support it does not mean, that everything works fine.

[fritsch]

Post a Debug Log, please. Far too much speculations ...