I ended up switching to the Flatpak version of Kodi to avoid these issues, so unfortunately I can't easily test (especially since I'm also using sid, which I see is on an alpha version of Kodi 20 now).
> How did you do AC3 to AAC transcoding (playing DVD with kodi 19?).
It was the other way around, transcoding from AAC to AC3.
You can achieve that by disabling AAC passthrough for Pulseaudio via pavucontrol, and enabling the AC3 transcoding setting in Kodi.
IIRC it only affected source files with AAC tracks, normal AC3 passthrough still worked.
> Mind that upstream kodi ships ffmpeg 4.3.2 so maybe ffmpeg version
> above that one has a regression (since fixed in ffmpeg 5.1 because
> debian kodi 20 with debian ffmpeg 5.1 has DVD audio working).
> So maybe it was this debian ffmpeg 4.3.2 that you reverted to back
> then, hard to tell.
I checked my dpkg logs but they don't go back far enough :(
FWIW the Flatpak version of Kodi 19.4-Matrix seems to ship with ffmpeg 4.3.4.
> (maybe pipewire supports passwthrough nowadays, hard to tell)
It actually does! But I found it to be buggy (especially with E-AC3 and DTS), so I'm staying on Pulseaudio for now.
Greetings,
Markus