I remember kszaq talking of a use case when I was trying to submit a pull request to LE where by a user may want to play audio with no hdmi connected and use Kore to control Kodi, I assume you are trying to do something similar here. The spdif stays active with chinese S905 boxes when no HDMI is connected so the same should happen here.
It seems that this is a combination of compounded problems traceable back to dubious decisions made by the Kodi team to disable passthrough in certain situations due to sync issues. This effected the driver within Libreelec which dropped support for a seperate SPIDF feed. I checked that this wasn't just an issue with the Libreelec settings by running aplay -L which has the same ALSA cards as Libreelec shows. The driver fudge seems to be that SPIDF was simply slaved to the HDMI output and responds to the same handshaking signals as the TV, and no SPIDF card exists.
It seems that its a common problem to all the s912 boxes.
Its not an Amlogic hardware issue.
This is an ALSA driver issue so it could be solved with a re-write of the sound drivers, but since this has been hanging for a while now its unlikely to get solved any time soon.
So my use case is that we use my box for Radio listening and it offends me that I have to have the TV on to do so (burning 200W+ of power to drive a visualization). Its not a deal breaker but is very annoying. Rolling back to Jarvis would probably solve it, but then the prospect of getting the sat support working recedes into never never land.
So I am thinking, would an audio signal splitter resolve the issue. I cannot get from the specs whether the splitter boxes take over handshake duties or whether the TV is still master when it comes to telling the Kodi box whether there is a TV present.
Shoog
