Kodi Community Forum

Greetings,

I've been running v18 on a Fire TV, and starting around late February/early March (not sure exactly when because I was out of town for a week, and it was like this when I got back), out of the blue, the sound just stopped working. Not only that -- as reported by others -- so long as Kodi is running in the background, sound doesn't work at all. Ever since then, I've been banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what's going on with this. I've reinstalled numerous times with newer and older builds of v18 and still had the same issue.

I finally installed v17.6, and EUREKA! I've got my sound back! However.... I've become pretty accustomed to the improvements and features in Leia and would really like to be able to run it if possible, so I reinstalled v18 and ran debug for a few minutes with Audio set to verbose. Here's the log output:

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/9K9fMPwhct/

Looking through, I see a handful of the following warnings:
 WARNING: CAndroidJoystickState: ignoring unknown axis 32 on input device "Harmony Keyboard" with ID 14

I've recently added a Logitech Harmony Hub to get rid of all my remotes and control my entertainment center from an iOS app. It connects to the Fire TV like a bluetooth remote. This is one possible correlation that comes to mind at this point, so I'm mentioning it in case it helps. Perhaps the next troubleshooting step I'll try is removing it as a remote in the Fire TV settings and go back to the original remote, then see what happens. Besides that, I can only speculate that Amazon pushed out a firmware update that doesn't play well with others. My audio is set to 5.1 Dolby surround and all the other settings are as recommended. I wouldn't think settings would have anything to do with it, regardless, since this impacts the whole system while the Kodi process is running.

Let me know if any additional information would be useful.

TIA!
-RR

(2018-03-18, 22:07)tweakling Wrote: [ -> ]out of the blue, the sound just stopped working

I think this is the critical comment. I would suggest it is something outside of Kodi that has happened on your firestick.

I have looked at your log, but it has been edited, and debug mode is not enabled, so there is nothing to see in it. Maybe try again.

I'm not trying to argue since I greatly appreciate your assistance with this, but I'm not sure what you mean. I'm pretty sure I copied/pasted the entirety of the kodi.log file without making any changes to it, and at the very bottom it says:

11:04:54.298 T:18446744072516801352  NOTICE: Disabled debug logging due to GUI setting. Level 0.
11:04:54.299 T:18446744072516801352  NOTICE: Log level changed to "LOG_LEVEL_NORMAL"

Indicating that debugging had been running all along. Are you referring specifically to verbose debugging for audio, which I claimed to have enabled?

Just trying to clarify before spending the next hour (yes, this is an embellishment) backing up my current v17.6 installation, installing v18, debugging, then reinstalling & restoring v17.6 again.

Thanks!
-Rob

That means debug logging isn't enabled.

Go to settings > system > logging and enable debug logging (first menu entry).

Then reboot, recreate your issue, turn off login and upload the log.

Ok, let's try this again. I fired up debug logging, started to play a video, then remembered what you'd mentioned about shutting down starting back up, so I did that and started up the same video again.

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/gptyWq6RCZ/

You say that it's something outside of Kodi on my Fire TV box (just to clarify, it's not the stick, in case that matters), which I suspect as well. However, this is specifically a conflict with v18. While running v17.6, the sound works and there is no impact to the rest of the system. 

I would just roll with 17.6 and let this go, however, since I've been using this version, I'm unable to watch any high-resolution (i.e. 1080p) videos because the video constantly clips and the audio pitch is bent all over the place making everything sound like a horror movie track. Lower-resolution videos are better, but there's still some clipping here and there. This was never an issue while on v18.

One observation I made that might be worth noting: With v18 was installed, while on the Fire TV home screen, I paused for a moment on the preview section just below the very top menu bar, and low-and-behold, there was sound with the previews! That was it, though. No click sounds going through the app icons, no sound from Hulu or Starz videos or anything else, so long as Kodi was running in the background. 

That's all I've got. Please let me know if there's any other information I can provide.

Thanks!
-Rob

Bumping this to see if there's any help out there.

Can confirm this is still an issue with 18.0 on a AFTV Gen 1.  No audio at all in kodi, and when I exit to the AFTV homepage there is also no audio until I force stop Kodi. Turned off Dolby Plus in the AFTV settings like some other posts have recommended but to no avail.

Had this been fixed in newer Leia versions?

(2020-03-09, 04:53)haruko_potato Wrote: [ -> ]Had this been fixed in newer Leia versions?

Well, either it got fixed with newer 18.x code or else Amazon put something back to the way it was in their FireTV code (I've always assumed a FireTV code update is likely what broke it out of the blue in the first place). I'm now running the latest stable Leia release on my new FireTV Cube, which I purchased after recently upgrading to a 4K TV. I had already been running Leia on my older FireTV again for a while, though. After not receiving any help from this forum, I finally just went ahead and installed Kodi on my AppleTV instead, and even paid for the Apple Developer's License so that it would be good for a year. Once a year was up, however, I didn't want to shell out another $100, so I gave the FireTV another shot. By that time, v18.x was stable and much to my delight, it worked with sound! As I said, no clue who fixed what to make that happen. I'm just happy to have my favorite media player back on the FireTV (MUCH better than on the AppleTV).