I’ve been playing around with this for hours while reading several man pages and Wiki’s but I just can’t get it to work.
I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 and I would like Kodi to use my ALSA HDMI soundcard directly and do passthrough audio over it. However I would also like to run PulseAudio to support music streaming from my phone over Bluetooth. This music must be send to a different sink/ALSA card (to the analog and/or SPDIF out) so it shouldn’t interfere with HDMI passthrough audio from Kodi.
So is it possible to let Kodi use my ALSA HDMI soundcard and also run PulseAudio to handle Bluetooth streaming to SPDIF and/or analog out (which are different ALSA interfaces)?
On LibreELEC this seems to be working perfectly. Kodi can passthrough audio over HDMI while watching a movie for example and I can simultaneously stream Bluetooth audio which is routed to an analog output sink.
I tried killing PulseAudio manually, then starting Kodi. Kodi can then access the HDMI ALSA sound card. However if I try to start PulseAudio again (while still running Kodi) it hangs and won’t start before Kodi has been closed (thus when the ALSA card has been released by Kodi). When using pasuspender basically the same thing happens, as long as Kodi is running it’s not possible to use PulseAudio.
It would be great if I could exclud the ALSA HDMI card from PulseAudio somehow so the card is not in use and can be used by Kodi exclusively, can that be done through config files for example? Or can the ALSA HDMI card be released by PulseAudio without killing the PulseAudio process altogether?
I hope anyone with more experience than me can give me some pointers or tips.
Thank you!