omxplayer + livestreamer: twitch.tv streams > cant use -o hdmi

Question

Im trying to watch twitch.tv streams with omxplayer and livestreamer. Running the Pi Foundation raspian. I got it working, there is just a little problem with the sound:

command I am using:

livestreamer twitch.tv/$PUTGAMECHANNELHERE best -np omxplayer

It does the job really well - except the fact that sound is not being send to hdmi!

I think that the problem is omxplayer! By default when i play a video with omxplayer there is no sound on hdmi. But after setting an alias (alias omxplayer='omxplayer --adev hdmi') it does work and i can hear sound via hdmi.

The Problem is that the alias doesnt seem to work when using omxplayer with livestreamer. Also i cannot set the -o hdmi parameter to the livestreamer start command (livestreamer twitch.tv/$PUTGAMECHANNELHERE best -np omxplayer -o hdmi doesnt work).

Any Solutions?

Answer 1

The alias does not work for 1 or 2 reasons. The 1st is that aliases are not expanded by default for non-interactive shells. The 2nd is that the alias may not even be defined for non-interactive shells, depending on where you defined the alias (stuff in "bashrc" files is never loaded for non-interactive shells).

If the alias is defined (eg, because it is in an applicable "profile" file), then you can set:

shopt -s expand_aliases

to use all defined aliases in non-interactive shells. Doing that in general is probably not desirable, so one idea is to put all this together in a script:

alias omxplayer='omxplayer -o hdmi'
shopt -s expand_aliases 
livestreamer twitch.tv/$PUTGAMECHANNELHERE best -np omxplayer

And execute that.

However

You might first try just quoting the argument to livestreamer:

-np "omxplayer -o hdmi"

To see if that works, which is probably a better solution than relying on an alias.