Arch Linux

BultiZ

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2014-06-08

Posts: 50

Website

Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

Im not an pro in pulse audio or alsa and sinks and whatever makes sounds work in our linux boxes
For some year ive used Rygel to stream audio to my xbmc/kodi from my arch laptop, its been clumsy, buggy and slow..
Ive followed alot of guides of pulseaudio over network but never succeded...

What would be the best way to stream from arch linux laptop to Kodi (OpenELEC)? Running gnome DE so a slick little switch would be awsome to turn on streaming to Kodi

Give me tips and guides!

Edit: Rygel have stopped working and cant read my config anymore so i cant get it to work anymore either.. Bah!

Last edited by BultiZ (2015-04-03 18:54:58)

amvakar

Member

Registered: 2013-12-04

Posts: 21

Re: Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

For Kodi, simply enable AirPlay and use paprefs on the laptop to make AirPlay devices available locally. I don't know of a truly slick solution for redirecting audio, but pavucontrol does the job. You might need to replace pulseaudio with pulseaudio-raop2-git (from AUR in order to get anything resembling decent performance, but perhaps your setup is much better than mine.

BultiZ

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2014-06-08

Posts: 50

Website

Re: Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

For Kodi, simply enable AirPlay and use paprefs on the laptop to make AirPlay devices available locally. I don't know of a truly slick solution for redirecting audio, but pavucontrol does the job. You might need to replace pulseaudio with pulseaudio-raop2-git (from AUR in order to get anything resembling decent performance, but perhaps your setup is much better than mine.

Ive tried that, but cant get it working, would be more slick than Rygel atleast..
If i enable AirPlay and start playing something Kodi starts playing a stream called AirPlay but with no sound at all..
Ive tried that version of Pulseaudio but couldnt get it to even play sounds locally...

BultiZ

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2014-06-08

Posts: 50

Website

Re: Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

Just an idea, is there a sink for airplay? then i maybe need to combine the "analog" sink with the AirPlay sink to make it work?

amvakar

Member

Registered: 2013-12-04

Posts: 21

Re: Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

I don't normally use any hardware devices on the machine I do this with, but I have managed to get ALSA sinks working with the pulseaudio-raop2-v2-v5.99.1-git package from the AUR. The downside (at least with Enlightenment, not sure about GNOME) is that I have to start pulseaudio manually on every login. But it does actually play on both without any additional configuration outside paprefs.

CoRePuLsE

Member

Registered: 2015-04-09

Posts: 1

Re: Stream Audio to XBMC/Kodi

You can also use pulseaudio-dlna which will allow you to select a upnp/dlna device as a device for sound output,

in order to stream audio on arch we are going to build pulseaudio-dlna and run it:

Clone the git:

git clone [url]https://github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna.git[/url]

you’ll need a few python packages along with python 2.7:

pacman -S python2 python-pip python-dbus python-beautifulsoup python-docopt python-requests python-gobject vorbis-tools sox lame flac opus-tools

we’ll also need python-setproctitle which is available on the aur, so use your favourite aur helper to download and install it:

now, We’ll need to load the dbus-protocol module for pulseaudio in order to get it to work, so:

open /etc/pulse/default.pa:

sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa

insert the following line somewhere to load in

load-module module-dbus-protocol

when inside the git folder we just cloned, run the following:

make install

now, start it:

pulseaudio-dlna

finally, go to your audio config and select your output device, that’s it!

every time you’ll want to stream your audio to a dlna/upnp device you’ll need to run it though, so consider making a service file for it(not going to cover that here though, but you’re welcome to leave a comment with a pre-baked .service file contents for reference for visitors if you want ).

Also, just know that pulseaudio-dlna has a significant delay – about 5 secs for me when I tested it, so it’s not the way to go if you wanted a fast responding audio streaming service. still very useful for music, etc. in my opinion.

Last edited by CoRePuLsE (2015-04-09 14:04:52)