I recently upgraded my Vero4K to latest osmc release (August) including kodi 19.1. Release notes told me bluetooth streaming should be working now out of the box. So I tried pairing my phone, which it did without problem. OSMC is now registered as an audio device on my Android phone and my phone automatically re-connects when in range. So that part looks fine… But no sound is played by OSMC (nor my phone anymore as it is forwarded to osmc through bluetooth) …
I’ve read on this forum about a BTplayer addon for playing BT streams, but I can’t find that addon in the repo’s. On the other hand I’ve read somewhere here that development on BTplayer also stopped again… so I assume it is deprecated and not required.
And I don’t find any clear explanation on how I should now proceed to actually enjoy bluetooth audio except that it should work out-of-the-box which it clearly doesn’t do on my box…
In order for bluetooth to take over the audio output, Kodi has to release it first. Make sure you have ‘Keep audio device alive’ off or set to a short timeout. Bluetooth will always play to the default audio output (HDMI).
BTplayer is indeed gone as it was incompatible with the latest Kodi. You don’t need it for streaming.
That indeed seemed to be the problem. It was set to 5 minutes. When turned off, BT audio immediately started working. Too bad there is no on screen information for the moment, but I can live with that.
Also I noticed that I have to forcefully stop the bluetooth connection from my android before Kodi itself is again able to play sound by itself. So I assume the BT streaming keeps the audio device locked… Or maybe there is also a timeout and I didn’t wait long enough for that to happen 
As long as there’s BT audio incoming, Kodi can’t grab the audio device back.
I just tested, if Vero is playing, say, live TV and BT audio which was playing is stopped or even just paused, live TV doesn’t grab the audio device automatically but if you stop and start TV it will then send audio to HDMI.
Functionality of bluez-alsa which we are using is being added to all the time so expect some refinements to come along in due course.
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