2018-01-01, 05:01
Hi there,
first of all, I wish you all a happy new year 2018! Moreover, many thanks for this interesting add-on which goes one step further in the right direction. In theory.
Firstly, I want to mention a well-known kodi/squeezelite problem that is not caused by this Add-on, but that may be the reason for several problems mentioned here in this thread: Kodi and squeezelite cannot share the same physical audio device. That is, if you connect your kodi box to an external receiver and you want to play Kodi sound and squeezelite sound (e.g., via hdmi), you may run into problems. Especially those kind of problem that it sometimes works and sometimes not. Here some observations:
Best regards,
first of all, I wish you all a happy new year 2018! Moreover, many thanks for this interesting add-on which goes one step further in the right direction. In theory.
Firstly, I want to mention a well-known kodi/squeezelite problem that is not caused by this Add-on, but that may be the reason for several problems mentioned here in this thread: Kodi and squeezelite cannot share the same physical audio device. That is, if you connect your kodi box to an external receiver and you want to play Kodi sound and squeezelite sound (e.g., via hdmi), you may run into problems. Especially those kind of problem that it sometimes works and sometimes not. Here some observations:
- if Kodi is started, it locks the sound device
- if one (shell or this add-on) tries to start squeezelite, the start will fail and squeezelite is not running
- 1st solution to start squeezelite: disable Kodi GUI sound (keep audio device active => Off). Problem: no Kodi GUI sound (in contrast to the German manual, which says that Kodi will release the device after GUI audio output
- 2nd solution (part 1): add the "-r" option to squeezelite, e.g., "-r 384000". I don't know whether this is by intention, but if you add this option and start squeezelite (even if Kodi blocks the device), squeezelite keeps running. However, squeezelite cannot play sound, since Kodi still blocks the device.
- 2nd solutions (part 2): If you set "keep audio device active" to, e.g., 1 minute, Kodi releases the audio device after 1 minute. That is, if you start audio playback of squeezelite about 1:10minutes after the last GUI operation of Kodi, squeezelite plays sound. This is not a big limitation, because normally squeezelite will not be used (at least by me) within one minute after using Kodi
- Minor: Since squeezebox for Kodi does not use the "-r" Option, I cannot use the default configuration of starting squeezelite (ok, I can use the "manual path" option to start my own script, but this also requires modifications of the underlying system). Therefore, I start (as in the past) squeezelite via .config/autostart.sh (on libreelec 8.2.2)). Here, it would be very helpful if the add-on would allow to add further parameters to the squeezelite command (could also be used to add debug/log support).
- Major: The 2nd solution does unfortunately not work if this add-on is active. Even if I start playing audio after Kodi released the audio device, squeezelite cannot open it. I don't know why, but it may be related to the fact (I read it somewhere) that this add-on creates some kind of dummy audio output. If kodi plays the dummy audio, and if the add-on is faster than squeezelite, it could be the case that Kodi already locks the audio device before squeezelite can do it. But this is only a guess, there may be another reason. Don't know, but maybe it would help if the add-on would wait a short moment until it starts playing the dummy audio.
- Minor: I noticed that the add-on does not correctly update album covers, at least with radio streams. It seems to update the cover before the server updated it? As a result, always the cover of the last song is shown. My picoreplayer-based client correctly updates the covers...
- Minor: If I disable the add-on, Kodi freezes and I have to restart
Best regards,
