Audio files not playing (KODI 17.3 on Solo4K) - use of external player required?

[Mr_D]

Hi,

Recently installed KODI 17.3 from the official feed (Kodi Launcher). My box is a Solo4K running the latest OpenVIX (5.0.023).

Though all movie files play just fine (incl. sound), the music files do not play. Or rather they play, but there is no output. The audio files are in various formats (the usual .mp3, .flac, etc.) and play fine on the laptop, from the NAS, etc. Note that the system audio sounds cannot be heard either.

First in KODI under Settings -> System -> Audio I noticed that "Audio Decoder" is blank and "Audio output device" is greyed out (and blank). Possibly a problem there. Could also be related to some advice on line that the KODI file /usr/share/kodi/system/playercorefactory.xml had to be changed to use a different player for audio files. Some suggested using mediaplayer2 or e2player (I ran a "find" on / but could not locate either, no trace of those in the feeds either unless I missed something).

Has anyone come across the same problem and fixed it? If it was fixed by modifying playercorefactory.xml could you provide the fragment of .xml to be inserted in the file?

Many thanks,
Mr_D

[Mr_D]

Hi,

Has anyone with a vu+ Uno/Solo/Ultimo 4k managed to get audio files to play correctly? If not then it is probably a bug only affecting the ARM boxes and I will report it as such to developers.

Quick update. I modified /usr/share/kodi/system/playercorefactory.xml to change the player for audio files by using the default (external) e2 player. The code modification looks like:

<!-- Debug -->
<rule name="flac" filetypes="flac" player="E2Player" />

So with the above .flac files are played by E2Player instead of the default. Audio plays fine, but with a blank (black) screen and the usual controls displayed when playing movie recordings. This is not great as we lose the benefits of the KODI interface while playing music.

Looking at the log files /var/log/messages (debug info turned on for audio in KODI), the following could be found when playing an audio file through the default player (with no sound):

20:32:59.673 T:2393895920 NOTICE: Creating audio stream (codec id: 86017, channels: 2, sample rate: 44100, no pass-
through)
20:32:59.673 T:2393895920 ERROR: Process - failed to create audio renderer

and also

20:32:45.023 T:2992632816 NOTICE: Process: Showing Kodi window
20:32:45.056 T:3009410032 NOTICE: No Devices found - retry: 4
20:32:46.576 T:3009410032 NOTICE: No Devices found - retry: 3
20:32:48.102 T:3009410032 NOTICE: No Devices found - retry: 2
20:32:49.634 T:3009410032 NOTICE: No Devices found - retry: 1
20:32:50.023 T:2992632816 ERROR: ActiveAE::Resume - failed to init

So it would help if anyone with a Uno4k/Solo4k or Ultimo4k could report if they're successful (or not) playing audio files with KODI so that I can decide whether it's a config issue at my end, or a bug in the vu+/ARM port of KODI. If a bug, I'll report it through proper channels.

Thanks,
Mr_D

[ISeeFridges]

Bit late to the party on this one, but this has been the only way I could get MP3s and FLAC files to play on my Uno4kSE using KODI. I've tried pretty much every setting and spent many hours trying to get them to play, but to no avail.