Kodi Community Forum

I have always used Kodi on a headless linux machine, which always worked like charm, when setting the video playback with turned on deinterlacing and proper video scaling methods, artefacts and tearing effects were never an issue.

For other reasons, however, I had to change from a server version ob ubuntu 15.10 to its desktop variant, using the unity 7 desktop environment, which relies on Composite. Starting Kodi in that environment produced a lot of tearing effects with the same settings as before.

After reading many entries across the forum, I tried to enable / disable the "Unredirect Fullscreen Windows" option using Compiz Config Settings Manager. Turning it off reduced the Tearing artefacts, but it produced a different effect, which was an occasionally blinking screen in Kodi when moving through the menu.

So I thought if it's possible to completely disable the Desktop environments Display postprocessing like Compiz and OpenGL for a fullscreen application like Kodi, and have the nice and flawless plain xserver running for that application, but the full Unity experience for the rest.

The best solution would be, if, on boot, tty1 would launch a standard xserver with Kodi running, while, lets say tty7, launches Ubuntus lightdm and logs me into a Unity session. How could I achieve that?

Thanks for the help.

Found a solution:http://askubuntu.com/questions/679419/how-to-make-auto-login-work-in-ubuntu-no-display-manager

Simply add another autologin service for tty1 and add "kodi" to the .xinitrc in your home directory. At boot, ubuntu desktop will login to tty7 using composite and all the fancy gui stuff, while the "startx" in your .bash_profile will simply start a nice and clean xserver for kodi. Ctrl-Alt-F1 brings you to kodi then, Ctrl-Alt-F7 gives you your ubuntu desktop.

Take care that sharing sound devices most likely won't work correctly on session based pulseaudio - in case of alsa unity session might not get any audio at all or removes the audio capabilities from kodi when scanning for audio devices.

Thanks for the advice, I haven't used any audio devices on the unity session yet. But starting kodi with the AE_SINK=ALSA prefix works like charm so far.

Check the wiki on pulseaudio why this harms ... it's not a solution, really ... whenever the desktop session plays some audio - your kodi session gets the audio devices killed :-(

Yes, it does. Depending on what my Desktop session did, Kodis audio devices got messed up. My AVR vanished occasionally, Kodi started to fall back to Pulseaudio, no more DTS-HD. I ended up disabling pulseaudio completely (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7130/2), now its working like charm.