I’ve seen similar reports to this one but couldn’t find a thread not related to flatpak so I’m creating a new thread.
The problem is that Kodi 21 now defaults to pipewire so there’s no sound, and it freezes when trying to exit so it has to be killed from the command line.
I’ve spent about 3 hours trying to debug the problem and get it to work, but even running it with “–audio-backend=pulseaudio” or “–audio-backend=alsa” doesn’t fix the freeze on exit problem, though the sound does work with those options.
About half those hours were spent uninstalling pulseaudio and getting pipewire to work, but even then the freezing problem still occurs with a pipewire unlocking problem.
So for now it doesn’t look like Kodi 21 can work on Arch Linux. And since there are a lot of reports with errors with pipewire in general for other programs, including locking problems, I uninstalled most of pipewire and reinstalled pulseaudio.
However Arch now has dependencies that require pipewire and libpipewire to be installed even though they’re not used, so that may be why Kodi now thinks they’re the default. However they don’t cause problems with pulseaudio with other programs, so it appears there’s something broken with Kodi audio.