Not sure where exactly to post this… Anyway, I have a use case where I want my Kodi plugin to play short WAV files. Think of these as greetings – similar to say Siri or Alexa. My Kodi setup is running Windows 10, connected via HDMI to my AVR. My sound setup in Kodi is WASAPI with passthru enabled. I also have Keep audio device alive set to “Always” and the send low volume noise is Enabled. (
I’m not trying to play these WAV files during normal media playback – only when Kodi is idle. I think that’s important because of the Pass Thru configuration.
My issue is that I have to encode my WAV files with a prepended silence period of about 1 second, or else the sound is lost. The WAVs are greetings like “Hello”, Good Afternoon”, etc, so they are quite short. I believe I need to have the prepended silence because there is handshaking going on over the HDMI interface and only once that is done does will the playback in progress begin to be heard through the AVR.
At the idle state, my AVR shows “PCM” on the display, and it switches to “Decoder Off” when I play the wav file.
My question: Is there a way that I can play the WAV file without having to prepend the silence? As a solution it works, but the 1 second delay isn’t ideal (I’m doing Speech Recognition and the delay is ackward). I’ve tried turning the “send low volume noise” to Disabled but that doesn’t help. Is there a different encoding on the WAVs that somebody can think of that might work? I thought about playing the WAV files outside of kodi, but I ran into issues with Exclusivity on the sound device, so I gave up on that. One thing I haven’t tried is having Kodi loop a silent WAV file continuously to keep the AVR “alive” with the correct handshaking, but it feels like a big hack that will cause other problems.
Those that might be interested can read about what I’m doing here