[TiberiusT]

good day all...ages since I posted here. Guess this is a trestament to how reliable XBMC/Kodi has been for me the past few years.

Anyway I now have it installed on a NUC which plugs into HDMI on my “peasants edition” LG TV. Works perfectly. But bcos the audio on the TV is so crap, I want to dual output to my stereo system to switch on/off as required. I have a USB audio adapter with 3.5mm output which I know has kernel support in Linux. So, easy I thought: just combine sinks with Pulseaudio. But there’s no Pulseaudio! Ironically after struggling with it for years and wishing it would burn in hell or that it was never born at all, I finally really want it and it’s not there. And it’s not in the repos either. Does this mean it’s not recommended to install it?

I can only find a testing ppa (very dodgy IME), so do I have to compile stable from source? Are there any issues that I could expect if I do this? Pulse can be a nightmare to get rid of once it got it’s hooks into your system and I have quite a customised Kodi setup which i don’t want to have to reinstall (I’ll clonezilla anyway but that’s a pain). The TV takes stereo only (no passthru) so it shud be easy to combine sinks with Pulse installed.

Thanks for any guidance b4 I take the plunge

T

[fritsch]

It was very hard for me to understand your pseudo l33t language.

Everything concerning this topic is said in the wiki: http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio

[TiberiusT]

My apologies - a bit too local on my English.

I just need to know how best to install pulseaudio on Kodibuntu. And is there a serious reason it's not in the repositories? Neither of these questions is covered in the wiki. I do not want to install the testing version of Pulseaudio since I am sure that will contain bugs. I am well versed with Pulseaudio and Alsa generally and I can understand fully why Pulse is not installed as default.

Should i just compile from git and see what happens?

Tks
T

[fritsch]

It has nothing to do with the way you are compiling kodi. The wiki mentions why ALSA is to be prefered if one is running a media center only. This answers your second question (why it is disabled).

Pulseaudio installation was made forbidden (!), cause users would install packages which would have a dependency on PA and come back here whining cause of the HD Audio not working anymore.

-> See /etc/apt/preferences.d/ directory - here is a file to disallow installation of pulseaudio and libasound2-plugins and so on ... Remove that file, call sudo apt-get update and it will be installable again.

[TiberiusT]

Perfect! That's what I needed to know. I'll clonezilla and try it.

Don't worry...I know the risks so I won't whine!

Cheers
T

[TiberiusT]

yeeeeehaaaa! (Is that l33t?)

Tks Fritsch - I installed pulseaudio and also paprefs and pavucontrol. The only issue was that the USB audio was set too low and I just adjusted it in pavucontrol - which stayed where I put it on reboots. I set up the combined sink using paprefs - I have nightmares about editing /etc/pulse/default.pa

It seems to be working absolutely perfectly - and it is simultaneous, the delay, if any, must be less than 10ms on the USB output. I tested on stereo/DTS/and 5.1 sources. Seeing as how I am only outputting to 2 speakers (TV only accepts stereo thru the HDMI) I was expecting it to work but this is definitely the easiest implementation of Pulse that I have ever had

Cheers
T

[theslime]

Sorry for hijacking someone else's thread, but this seems relevant.

I recently switched from using Alsa (which worked perfectly) to a dual audio output through PulseAudio because I had to switch to my old analogue amp, and using this setup I don't need to have my TV on to listen to music. Like this:

1) PC -> HDMI -> TV -> headphone out -> Amplifier (for videos)
2) PC -> line out -> Amplifier (for music (or videos))

However, now I have a delay of several seconds before the sound comes on, on every video. The delay is (roughly, at least) the same regardless of which sound output I use. I have an Asus Chromebox (set up with the help Matt Devo's thread) and everything else is smooth.

Logs:
cat ~/.kodi/temp/kodi.log | pastebinit
http://paste.ubuntu.com/12533375/
dmesg | pastebinit
http://paste.ubuntu.com/12533377/

I don't know if any other logs would be helpful. Is there a separate PulseAudio log?

Thanks in advance!

[fritsch]

Try: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2113797

[theslime]

Thanks! I didn't see that thread. I upgraded now, and I only had time to test once, but it looks like a huge improvement. Not instant like Alsa, but from 10-15 seconds delay in starting to maybe 2 seconds (which I can definitely live with). Can provide logs tomorrow.