it would be great to see (paired) bluetooth audio devices in the kodi audio settings drop down.
it is currently possible to get them to appear by creating an .asoundrc file as described here: [How-to] set up Bluetooth audio
however, creating this file requires a fair bit of technical skill. it would be great if the osmc bluetooth page had an option to generate an .asoundrc after pairing an audio device - even if not automatic/clicking a button.
i can appreciate this should not automatically happen in case a non-audio bluetooth device is paired (ie, you don’t want a remote, keyboard, etc showing up).
i can appreciate it not being trivial. it really was not a lot of work for me to generate the .asoundrc file - but i’m good with ssh/vi.
i’d also like to say a huge thanks to the osmc team for improving the bluetooth audio support so much. i had all but given up on it in previous versions (using a pi3 b+), but it seems way more solid now. so, many thanks for your work.
The problem is hooking it in to Kodi and interacting with DBus to do this.
We have a demo of this, but it doesn’t use the best approach. At the moment things are improved from where they were a while ago, so it’s better to get it right when we get time rather than bodge things.
As Sam says, we do have some experimental python that writes ALSA nodes for you when you pair an audio device. The real problem is communication between My OSMC and Kodi. Kodi is written so only devices that are both paired and connected appear in the audio settings. Also we want it to be ‘intuitive’ which probably means ‘working like a mobile phone does’ ie Kodi switches to BT as soon as you connect an audio device.
yeah - it would be nice if it was possible to integrate more tightly with the kodi settings rather than having to do most of that stuff in the My OSMC pages.
my suggestion, in case i wasn’t clear, was just that you generate the .asoundrc file (which isn’t particularly trivial if you consider there might be an existing file you need to merge with). then the bluetooth audio device will show up in kodi audio settings (after a reboot anyway)
i was totally blown away that after i added my bluetooth device, set it as the preferred device in kodi, the following worked: i powered on a bluetooth speaker after starting kodi and after starting media playback, it paired and started playing with no fiddling with settings. i turned the speaker off, and kodi went back to analogue output. this was perfect! so, you’re definitely making good progress.
while previously trying to setup bluetooth, i read some of the drama on a pulseaudio bluetooth PR. it just about made me cry. both the PR author and the project maintainer at loggerheads. glad there are some new projects to make bluetooth work.
