Suddenly no sound in Firefox after update

F

free-and-bsd

After a routine update of www/firefox to version 40.0.3,1 there is no sound in videos. Sure, there were some other updates at the same time, as usual, but no configuration changes.

So what could be the cause? It is no sound in HTML5 videos. With flash videos it's ok.
Here's firefox configure options:

Code: 
   ALSA  : off
   BUNDLED_CAIRO  : off
   CANBERRA  : off
   DBUS  : on
   DEBUG  : off
   DTRACE  : off
   GCONF  : off
   GIO  : on
   GNOMEUI  : off
   GSTREAMER  : on
   GTK2  : on
   GTK3  : off
   INTEGER_SAMPLES: off
   LIBPROXY  : off
   OPTIMIZED_CFLAGS: off
   PGO  : off
   PROFILE  : off
   PULSEAUDIO  : on
   TEST  : off
 
Also on my system the sound does not work with PULSEAUDIO. Turn PULSEAUDIO to OFF and ALSA to ON . But compile audio/alsa-plugins with
Code: 
BLKCNT_P2=on: Restrict number of fragments to ^2 aligned
BUFSZ_P2=on: Restrict buffer size to ^2 aligned
 
Unfortunately, this didn't help and html5 videos are still mute, although the browser now has alsa for its sound system.
At that multimedia/vlc has sound all right, also firefox itself has sound with flash content.
 
Thanks for the interesting utility. But actually firefox has too many dependencies, at that gstreamer doesn't even come into it, neither does it itself have any options. Of those that do come in which must have which configuration to make it all work?...

However, I installed alsa-utils and tried aplay -l, so it reports:
no soundcards found...

Perhaps, this is it? Though I must repeat it again: everything DID work fine and I introduced no changes into my configuration.
Then which of the ports
 
Aplay has nothing to do with html5 in firefox, aplay -l will ever output "no soundcards found", if you have no .asoundrc file. Aplay is a commandline-player.
 
Well I thought maybe it would show me how alsa is doing... But actually I rebuilt ffmpeg and other staff with alsa instead of pulseaudio -- all works well. Only the volume now is a good deal lower.

And with firefox still nothing.
 
talsamon said:
I guess you have installed multimedia/h264.
Click to expand...
No such port in my ports tree. I'm away from my computer right now, but on the clone system I have at work it's multimedia/libx264, and also multimedia/openh264..

EDIT:
Interestingly, I had flash as default player before, but after that upgrade firefox switched to HTML5 as default. But still I'm interested to know why it is that HTML5 works for other people and doesn't for me. What's most annoying is that there is NO idea how things work in firefox. It's a lot of talking about how nice all this "open" stuff is, and no documents on how it actually works...
 
Hm, looks like I need to disable flash in firefox for HTML5 to work. Just tried this at work and it works. Will check at home, too.
 
OJ said:
Code: 
about:config
search "video"
media.peerconnection.video.h264_enabled
Change to "true" worked for me.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I've set this, though it didn't help. Looks like there's something else here...

BTW, my firefox at work which now plays HTML5 all right is version 36, built with pulseaudio and not alsa. That's how we stand so far...

So maybe I'll have to rollback to the snapshot I took before upgrading, and that's the beauty of ZFS that it'll take me back to the working state.
 
free-and-bsd said:
Most interestingly, when I start firefox as sudo the sound works! Now what could that be, I wonder...
Click to expand...
Well, I've finally solved the problem by deleting the ~/.pulse directory. Although the browser is built with pulseaudio support, pulseaudio is not used while playing HTML5. It works now.

Evidently, alsa support isn't needed either? Because I've rolled back to the previous version, where both alsa and gstreamer support is turned off.
 
So finally, here's how it does work: firefox built with pulseaudio support. At that it must be noted that there are no processes for "pulseaudio" show up in the output for ps -A (root). It even works with pulseaudio altogether deleted from my system!

On the other hand, when built with alsa and gstreamer support there is NO sound, nor have I found any tricks to make it work this way. One thing, though, I haven't tried: I only have multimedia/gstreamer-plugins installed, which doesn't include all the plugins.

So there must be some particular setup you guys have which makes firefox+alsa work for you? I have tried it ever since I first installed FreeBSD, but it was never successful...
 
Interesting! Pulseaudio works last on FreeBSD 9.2 with firefox. After that I got it never to work. With alsa I had never problems (except this in the other thread).
 
It says
Code: 
gstreamer-0.10.36_4
gstreamer-plugins-0.10.36_6,3
gstreamer1-1.4.5_1
gstreamer1-libav-1.4.5
gstreamer1-plugins-1.4.5_2
gstreamer1-plugins-good-1.4.5
BTW, has gstreamer become any better than it used to be? I haven't used it for a few years and when I did the sound quality was rather poor compared to other sound systems available for Unix (well it was Linux back then for me).
 
free-and-bsd said:
It says
Code: 
gstreamer-0.10.36_4
gstreamer-plugins-0.10.36_6,3
gstreamer1-1.4.5_1
gstreamer1-libav-1.4.5
gstreamer1-plugins-1.4.5_2
gstreamer1-plugins-good-1.4.5
BTW, has gstreamer become any better than it used to be? I haven't used it for a few years and when I did the sound quality was rather poor compared to other sound systems available for Unix (well it was Linux back then for me).
Click to expand...
Looks like you have everything Gstreamer related that's required installed. I don't really have any other ideas on what to look at next at the moment, sorry.

I'm really not sure how much Gstreamer has improved as I'm not really much of a Linux user, but seeing as it's being continually developed and I haven't personally had any problems on FreeBSD related to it, I would imagine it's somewhat better than it was previously at least.
 
protocelt said:
Looks like you have everything Gstreamer related that's required installed. I don't really have any other ideas on what to look at next at the moment, sorry.

I'm really not sure how much Gstreamer has improved as I'm not really much of a Linux user, but seeing as it's being continually developed and I haven't personally had any problems on FreeBSD related to it, I would imagine it's somewhat better than it was previously at least.
Click to expand...
Well, do I need to mention that my firefox is even built without gstreamer support at all? It's just pulseaudio support, and audio/pulseaudio itself has been removed from the system. And it works all right.

So, this is the most annoying thing, when there's no obvious method nor manuals for this issue. Very much linux-like, I'd say.
 
OK, I think I can admit to my problem's being SOLVED. However, the solution isn't perfect, as I still have no clarity as to why it works the way it does.
But then, of course, I don't have time to try all the possible configurations for sound in www/firefox and then make a thorough manual upon the subject. I just know how to make it all work on a system which is an absolute clone of mine. Because actually all my 3 installations of FreeBSD, 2 desktops + 1 laptop, are clones of the same system (as /usr/local is concerned). That's the beauty of ZFS -- I only needed a different video driver for my laptop.
 
Last edited:
I can confirm this in a brand new installation where all ports were to be rebuilt from scratch, which I had to make for newly installed 11.0-CURRENT system. Again, no special effort was made to make sound work: no pulseaudio nor alsa, nor gstreamer proved to be needed -- pure OSS was just enough.
That is to say, as I've mentioned above, www/firefox was built with pulseaudio support (no way out of it), but then audio/pulseaudio was forcefully deleted and things work all right. Perhaps, it gets statically linked to pulseaudio libs or something like this...

Oh, but sure, the about:config settings for firefox which make it play HTML5 still have to be introduced as described in this thread. Just in my case I didn't have to bother as I share my home dir among all my installations. However, things work for root as well -- which means these config tweaks aren't as important as they may seem...

Finally, one thing worth mentioning: when playing YouTube videos with HTML5 playback sound gets out of sync with video. Too bad! But we still have the wonderful www/youtube_dl script to download the videos... but that's another story.
 
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