2018-09-12, 13:56
I currently have a Kodi device (nVidia Shield) for my TV & VoD viewing and a separate device (Logitech Duet) for my music listening. My hi-fi accepts two digital inputs so I put the digital audio from my Shield (extracted using an HDMI splitter) into one input for watching TV and the digital out from my Duet into the other input for listening to music.
It all works well but I'm wondering whether I could dump the Logitech Duet and use my Kodi device (the Shield for now but I might be switching to a mini PC) for music as well. The snag here is that I pretty much always still have the TV on when I listen to music so if I want to play music I leave the Kodi box playing and simply switch the input on my hi-fi to get the sound coming from the music streamer rather than the video stream. To do the same on Kodi I assume that I would need to be able to either...
1 - Support a second USB sound card on the kodi box and be able to set music playback to go to the USB card with video sound still going out of the HDMI port where it is split out by my HDMI splitter. This way I select the audio that I want to hear the same way as I do already by selecting the appropriate input on my hi-fi.
2 - Somehow set up things in Kodi so that I can have music take priority on the sole audio output device, the HDMI port, such that I can leave the video still playing but the sound being the music.
I suspect neither of the above are possible but though I should check. Are either of the above possible? I would be willing to try my hand at a bit of Python if I needed to write some sort of wrapper add-on to the music services to dynamically reset the audio output device when music playback was launched and reset it again on exit, or use some sort of context-menu accessible audio controller add-on to explicitly set the audio as needed. Failing that, is there some third option that I might have forgotten?
It all works well but I'm wondering whether I could dump the Logitech Duet and use my Kodi device (the Shield for now but I might be switching to a mini PC) for music as well. The snag here is that I pretty much always still have the TV on when I listen to music so if I want to play music I leave the Kodi box playing and simply switch the input on my hi-fi to get the sound coming from the music streamer rather than the video stream. To do the same on Kodi I assume that I would need to be able to either...
1 - Support a second USB sound card on the kodi box and be able to set music playback to go to the USB card with video sound still going out of the HDMI port where it is split out by my HDMI splitter. This way I select the audio that I want to hear the same way as I do already by selecting the appropriate input on my hi-fi.
2 - Somehow set up things in Kodi so that I can have music take priority on the sole audio output device, the HDMI port, such that I can leave the video still playing but the sound being the music.
I suspect neither of the above are possible but though I should check. Are either of the above possible? I would be willing to try my hand at a bit of Python if I needed to write some sort of wrapper add-on to the music services to dynamically reset the audio output device when music playback was launched and reset it again on exit, or use some sort of context-menu accessible audio controller add-on to explicitly set the audio as needed. Failing that, is there some third option that I might have forgotten?
