Peculiar ‘no HDMI audio’ problem

Posted on Author Kodi Community Forum - All Forums

Hi,

I’m trying to set up a new NUC with Kodi and I keep running into a rather strange HDMI audio problem.

The problem is that when I start Kodi, whether it is from command line or on startup, the audio over HDMI does not work, it is completely silent.

Now, I have found one workaround that work, but I have to do it every time I start Kodi:

  1. Go into System settings/Audio
  2. Change Audio output device to something else (does not seem to matter which)
  3. Change it back to the correct value (In my case “HDA Intel PCH, SAM SAMSUNG on HDMI #0”)
  4. Go to Display settings
  5. Change Refresh rate from the default 60 to 30 (might work with other values, not sure).
  6. Change it back to 60 (or simply answer ‘no’ to the question to persist the change
  7. Now audio is working perfectly

Strangely enough it is not enough to simply do one of the above steps, I actually have to change BOTH the audio output device and the video refresh rate back and forth for it to start working. And as soon as I close kodi and start it again, I have to redo it. I run kodi as a systemd service if that makes any difference (so starting and stopping with systemctl stop kodi). Here is the guide I used to set it up with Fedora, for reference http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kod…_packages.

I have tried three different reinstalls with different linux systems now, all with exactly the same problem and workaround: Fedora 25, LibreElec 8.0.1 and Ubuntu 17.04. Right now I’m on the last of the three, but I don’t really mind which linux flavour I end up using if one seems more stable than others.

I’m attaching the debug log from kodi start to having completed the steps above (the menu sounds are enabled so I notice immediately when the sound starts working).

System information:
System: Intel NUC7i3BNK
TV: Samsung UE46F5005XXE (HDMI 1.3)
Kodi version: 17.1

Debug log:
http://paste.debian.net/927703/

Any ideas? I’ve been trying to go through the debug log to understand what changes after having gone through the workaround steps, but as far as I can see it does open the correct output device both on kodi start and in the end of the log, and all of the ALSA sink stuff looks identical…

If it wasn’t working at all then I would be posting at the Intel site, but seeing as I found a workaround that I have to redo every time kodi is restarted and not just on boot it starts feeling like it might be a Kodi issue…

Cheers
Tobias