With the release of Kodi 21 some people were disappointed that PipeWire wasn’t working out-of-the-box with the Flatpak we provide. So we enabled PipeWire (https://github.com/flathub/tv.kodi.Kodi/pull/241) and suddenly we got angry responses from other people that their audio stopped working entirely. The problem was with Linux installations that were running PipeWire but not for audio (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/25002 and https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/25006). Our first reaction was to revert the Flatpak change and to make PulseAudio the default again (https://github.com/flathub/tv.kodi.Kodi/pull/252 and https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/25019). This time we got negative responses from people running PipeWire that their setup wasn’t working correctly anymore.
To provide the best experience for everybody we tried to make Kodi smarter when deciding which audio system to use (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/25043). This change is on our development branch for a month now and we are thinking about back porting it for Kodi 21.1. But before we do so we would like to get some feedback from testers. To test this just execute the command from https://github.com/flathub/tv.kodi.Kodi/…2131367184 to install the test version and launch Kodi with flatpak --user run tv.kodi.Kodi. This test build is our current Omega nightly with additionally the audio change from the development branch. To confirm that you are really running the test version verify that in the system information the “compiled” says 2024-05-25.
To remove the test build simply execute flatpak uninstall tv.kodi.Kodi and select app/tv.kodi.Kodi/x86_64/test (user).
If you find the time please leave a comment if audio is working for you as expected. Especially if you are running Ubuntu 22.04. Thanks 