Bluetooth dongle not connecting headphones

If you’ve paired your headphones with both Vero and your smartphone then the smartphone may be grabbing the connection. Try turning your phone off or making sure it’s out of range.

I decided to start from the beginning and removed the headphones from Vero with bluetoothctl remove command.
I paired headphones again via MyOSMC (strangely only way to pair them when using MyOSMC was using function “Pair with pin”, but it doesn’t matter, they paired)

After that everything works perfectly.

  1. Headphones are automatically connected to osmc when I turn them on.
  2. Now the headphones identify Vero as “osmc”. I did check the /etc/hostname and there was only osmc, nothing else. @sam_nazarko BCM4345CO Ampak 0073 was error or mistake on my part most probably. I think there is no need to look any further this matter, everything is working as supposed to.

My only logical conclusion is that even though somehow I got to headphones to pair without bluealsa service running, the pairing was not complete and the connection was messed up somehow.

I can report back to this thread on weekend about how the audio is actually working, after few minutes testing it works as it supposed to. Like I said that before I got random dropouts and lipsync issues but I was using Vero 4k+ internal bluetooth and A2DP package with Pulseaudio.
Now setup is different but it looks very promising!
Thanks again for the support.

Great to hear you got it going! What happens is if bluealsa isn’t running, the 'phones can connect with all their other BT services but not the a2dp audio service/profile. I guess we could look at stopping that happening.

After testing with couple of movies and series episodes bt audio is working excellent except one minor issue. I get these weird less than 1 second lasting audio dropouts which cause the audio and video to go out of sync. I got these issues already with a2dp package (using Pulseaudio) and using the internal bluetooth radio. These dropouts happen:

  1. Randomly one or two times during the uninterrupted playback on video lasting couple of hours.
  2. Every time I pause the player and resume. Audio gets out of sync.

In order to fix this issue I can do two things:

  1. Reconnect the headphones during pausing the video (turn headphones on and off and let them reconnect to Vero 4k+).
  2. Stop the video and resume the video from the GUI.

So my question is rather that is this known problem or perhaps this is issue with my hardware or should I dig little bit deeper what is happening during these out of sync issues?

I didn’t have debug logs enabled while watching movie but I will turn them on next time I’m going to watch a movie with bluetooth audio and post them here if someone can point out what would cause that to happen.

I can’t reproduce the loss of sync on pause and I’ve never used BT for a 2 hour video. I do use it to listen to the radio for long periods and I think I have had some occasional glitches but very few. @fzinken uses BT a lot - maybe he can comment.

Update - I think I’m getting this out-of-sync on UHD material - I don’t have a lot to test, though. Does it vary by type of video?

Well I only have 1080p & 720p with DD and DTS audio content (mkv) as my TV is not 4k capable nor AV receiver is not able to decode TrueHD / Atmos audio but mostly I get these glitches with 1080p movies (1.5hrs - 2hrs).

There is some correlation to the length of the video for the amount of the glitches happening, although they happen randomly.

Same use case, only using it for Radio (but that for long time). So can not comment on Video issues.

OK some update on the out of sync issue.
So I logged the times that this out of sync happened while watching a movie (may had happened other time too).

Dec 04 23:29
Dec 04 23:39
Dec 04 23:42
Dec 04 23:52
Dec 04 23:55

And from the logs I can find following happening on these occasions

Dec 04 23:52:13 osmc bluealsa[373]: /usr/bin/bluealsa: E: Couldn't release transport: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownObject: Method "Release" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.MediaTransport1" doesn't exist
Dec 04 23:52:13 osmc bluealsa[373]: /usr/bin/bluealsa: E: Couldn't release transport: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownObject: Method "Release" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.MediaTransport1" doesn't exist

I can’t interpret that error what it tells (or does it tell anything useful information)?

Logs here: https://paste.osmc.tv/valehehoga

Thanks for the logs. Looks like something in bluez-alsa not going right. I think we will adopt a more up-to-date version of bluez-alsa shortly. That may fix it.

Hi again with some update on this matter.
So I had some time and I did more extensive testing about the out of sync issue.

To conclude my findings (which are rather not scientific):

  • Randomly audio dropouts for less than a second and cause out of sync issue. Trigger might be something to do with bluez-alsa, or might not. Not really clear.
  • Taking the bluetooth headphones out of reach of the bluetooth transmitter and bringing them back will cause out of sync issue. Worthnoting is that there are no errors regarding the bluealsa in the logs while this happens.

The latter one finding is actually something that is interesting.
I believe that taking the headphones out of reach and letting them to reconnect with Vero 4k+ should not lead to out of sync issue?

Those glitches which create < 1 second dropouts are not in my opinion really a problem.
Out of sync issue is.

Please let me know when you have more up to date bluez-alsa ready for testing.
I will be more than happy to test it if needed.

Just yesterday I received my new Vero 4k+ (which replaces an old rpi2), and I’m struggling with this. I followed your instructions and installed the armv7-bluez-alsa-osmc.deb, edited the .asoundrc.example file, and my headphones seem to be connected. At least bluetoothctl says so, plus the Bluetooth icon in My OSMC turned from red to blue.

However, I still don’t get sound in my headphones. I checked the audio outputs in the System settings and I only get two options named some something like AML-M8AUDIO.

Should something else be there? I remember having ALSA as an option in my rpi2.

Try restarting Kodi: Power->Exit

and the file needs to called .asoundrc.

Thank you very much! Renaming the file did it. Now that I think of it, I don´t know how I didn’t realize that before…