Silent audio in certain cases after update to v19

[osmc-user]

I’m using OSMC on a RPi 3 and tried the update to v19 today. After the update procedure, a few addon related error messages appeared. I was able to get rid of them by deactivating the plugins (Special Features, BTPlayer).

There’s a major problem open that I couldn’t solve by myself yet: audio cannot be heared in some cases. For example:

• Area “Music”: FLAC files
• Area “Video”: Sound from a video where the audio stream is shown as “MP3”
• Plugin “Radio”: a MP3 stream
• Plugin “ARDundZDF”: A video with an AAC stream

No problem occurs for certain other files:

• Area “Video”: Sound from a video where the audio stream listed as “MP2”
• Plugin “Tvheadend”: sound of both live and recorded shows
• Area “Videos”: audio of a ripped DVD
• Area “Music”: a MP3 file
• Area “Pictures”: audio of a short clip made on a smartphone

There’s no error message on the screen, and I didn’t find a message in the log either. The system behaves as if the sound is played (e.g. for music, the progress bar is updated and I can skip forward), but nothing can be heared.

Setup: an RPi3, connected via HDMI to a Pioneer AVR, connected via HDMI to Sony TV.

I tried all 4 listed audio devices: “PulseAudio playback/recording”, “PulseAudio”, “vc4-hdmi PIO”, “vc4-hdmi direct MAI” (names are probably not 100% correct, cannot remember exactly). As far as I can tell, they all had the same behavior. I tried dis-/enabling passthrough, changing the number of channels - all without a difference.

After a the broken file is played, the UI sounds disappear. They do not come back, even after playing a file that can be heard normally. When I restart the kodi process via “Exit”, the UI sounds reappear.

I enabled debug logging for audio components but didnt find anything audio-related. The only message when I e.g. start an unhearable radio stream is

CDVDAudioCodecFFmpeg::Open() Successful opened audio decoder mp3float

I had no issues on v18.

Fortunately I made a backup of v18 on a spare SD card and went back to that for now. I can put the v19 card back in if required to further analyze the problem on v19 .

I don’t know where else to look or what to try, and really hope that someone has an idea.

Christian

[grahamh]

@osmc-user

“PulseAudio playback/recording”, “PulseAudio”,

If you installed PulseAudio with our old BT stack, then try removing it. See here for what to remove:

[How-to] set up Bluetooth audio

[Updated November 2021] Bluez-alsa allows you to stream audio both to and from your OSMC device. We have now integrated bluez-alsa into OSMC as a replacement for our a2dp package which is deprecated. Our Kodi v19 builds include bluez-alsa. If you are still on v18.9, you can install it on Vero 4k or RPi 2/3 with: sudo apt-get install armv7-bluezalsa-osmc and re-boot to get the bluealsa service started. If you have previously installed one of our older BT audio packages, you will need to re…

[osmc-user]

Thanks for your quick response. I removed pulseaudio according to the linked article. Now I have 3 audio devices:

1. Default (vc4-hdmi MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0)
2. vc4-hdmi, MAI PCM vc4-hdmi-hifi-0
3. vc4-hdmi, PIO VSX-529 on HDMI

Using “Default”), the audio problems are still there. But with entry 3 (my pioneer av receiver) I can play all audio - it looks like the problem is solved

I will observe everything and report back in case of further trouble. Thank you very much!

[MitchD]

This solution also fixed an issue I was having running OSMC 2021 (latest) .

Symptom: Playing some older mp3 files the status shows mp3 is playing, but there’s no audio. The same files play on other systems such as Kodi standalone and VLC where the audio works fine.

Solution: My HDMI cable, like the example above was connected to Default, changing to the HDMI ONK (for my Onkyo receiver) resolved the issue. Enabling kodi.log DEBUG didn’t help me, no errors just what appeared to be normal messages responding to events from the remote.