Arch Linux

itti

Member

Registered: 2007-06-01

Posts: 79

XBMC no longer works

Hi,

after the update of XBMC to 13.0 it no longer works on my living room arch box. By not working I mean that sound is completely gone and as soon as I start video playback it just crashes. I had problems like that in the past but was able to configure them away.

In the past I configured XBMC to explicitly use my HDMI Output through ALSA as I don't have any speakers on the internal soundcard but rather would like the sound to come from the TV speakers, hence the usage of HDMI. This I can no longer do as with the new systemd unit file the update brought somehow pulseaudio got into the picture and I see no way to configure pulseaudio to use HDMI. Note that XMBC runs as the user xbmc and I can't change pulseaudio settings for this user, as all of that lives in his own dbus session. Can I somehow connect to this users session and issue pulseaudio commands? pacmd on the console just gives errors otherwise. To be honest I don't get it why pulseaudio suddenly activated itself for that user or how it is started in the first place.

The video playback problem could be mitigated in the past by disabling VDPAU and VAAPI. I have an integrated nvidia gpu (Nvidia ION) though but it would always crash XBMC if I used accelerated video playback. Suddenly there is no such switch anymore in XBMC 13.0. I don't know what I have to configure here but now it is crashing all the time.

Sadly the wiki doesn't go into detail on any of these configuration options. It just rambles on about various ways to use remote controlls, when a simple Windows Media Center remote control does work and has been working without any configuration at all.

Any ideas, suggestions?

Last edited by itti (2014-05-10 08:50:29)

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,729

Website

Re: XBMC no longer works

Try posting on the xbmc forums?  If the crashes are related to their code, you might find others with the same problems.  You can downgrade until the issues are fixed.

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AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

itti

Member

Registered: 2007-06-01

Posts: 79

Re: XBMC no longer works

Yeah right, maybe I will do that...

Apart from that if someone other then me wants to disable the inbuilt pulse audio sink in xbmc 13.0 just add this to your sytemd unit file (copy it to /etc/systemd/system/xbmc.service):

Environment=AE_SINK=ALSA

After that you can freely choose sound hardware again in the xmbc settings and not just "pulseaudio".