# Kodi and 5.1 sound problem



## kurshlus (Feb 5, 2018)

Is 5.1 sound in Kodi without pulseaudio possible ?

Outside of Kodi 5.1 sound is working fine, playing the same video for example in mpv gives 5.1 sound without any problems.
In Kodi however, if video has stereo audio it works fine, even resampling to 5.1 works fine.
But if video has 5.1 sound then it's terrible, sound is distorted, volume is too low, hard to describe in words, it's just bad and unwatchable.
I've installed Pulseaudio but the pulseaudio device isn't showing in Kodi, maybe I need to compile Kodi and enable pulseaudio there ?
I'll certainly try that but I'm just curious if anyone else has the same problem without pulseaudio.


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## tobik@ (Feb 6, 2018)

Which Kodi port (multimedia/kodi or multimedia/kodi-devel) and exact version do you have installed? What is the FreeBSD version?


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## kurshlus (Feb 6, 2018)

multimedia/kodi 17.6, FreeBSD 11.1 amd64


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## kurshlus (Feb 16, 2018)

I installed Kodi from ports with pulseaudio enabled and it worked.
I have no idea how to proceed, except to use Kodi with pulseaudio, which isn't a problem but still, it's very interesting that 5.1 sound works with the same OSS device and without pulseaudio, but with other video players.
If someone wants to test this I can recommend this video, youtube AFAIK doesn't support 5.1 audio so in the description of that video is the link to the original file, for convenience here's that link


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## kurshlus (Feb 27, 2018)

Same situation with sndio.
Problem is with channel mapping, in pulseaudio I can solve that with :
`load-module module-combine channels=6 channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe`

but I have no idea how to do that in OSS / sndio.


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