Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

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sylos
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Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by sylos »

Hello there.

I'm using Kxstudio 14.04.2 and decided to upgrade my firefox version using Synaptic. The upgrade has gone ok (now using firefox 51.0.1) except for the loss of audio on almost all youtube videos. This is one of the main things I do on this PC so it's a bit of an issue.

So I have been trying to figure out the issue. The videos I am watching all have a url ending in "html5=1" which seems to suggest it is using the html option. Soundcloud (which also uses html5 if i recall) works fine. Looking at the "stats for nerds" on youtube it seems unclear what the difference is. Some videos using VP9 codec play but others dont. Some MP4 codec users play but others dont.

Looking in synaptic it appears that the ffmpeg-extras package is the newest available so I cant easily upgrade that.

So, anyone have any ideas what is going on? Even better - anyone got a fix? I'm scratching my head a bit on this.

Thanks.
varpa
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by varpa »

As a (hopefully temporary) work-around you can use the Chromium browser for youtube. Thats what I've been doing since firefox youtube sound broke.
sylos
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by sylos »

Thanks for the reply Varpa.

Sadly I have the same issue with chromium - no sound. Actually from what I can see I dont get sound on ANY videos on youtube with chromium - even ones that do have sound on firefox.
distrozapper
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by distrozapper »

Hi sylos,

I had the same issue after upgrading to Firefox 52.0. For some reason newer Firefox seems to rely on the presence of pulseaudio (at least - viewing a problematic yt video - it told me via message I should install pulseaudio).
So I enabled pulseaudio via kxstudio's cadence tool (I run my kxstudio/ubuntu 14.04.2 without pulseaudio by default) and that did the trick for me.
Maybe this is worth a try for you.
I hope this helps.
sylos
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by sylos »

Hello distrozapper

Thanks for the tip.

Can you elaborate on how you set it up? I've never used cadence and am very cautious about installing pulseaudio on the grounds that I have been using linux audio systems for the last 8 or 9 years and found pulse to be nothing short of a savage pain in the posterior.

Thanks
distrozapper
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by distrozapper »

Hi sylos,
AFAIK pulseaudio is installed by default on every *ubuntu in parallel to the alsa audio driver, kxstudio just adds the opportunity to enable/disable it on-the-go with its cadence tool, to let you select between a JACK and/or a pulseaudio driven audio system (both depend on ALSA).
Make sure you have installed these 2 packages:
pulseaudio-module-jack
cadence

In the cadence GUI, you can choose whether or not to start the pulseaudio service at login time. See attachment (hopefully).
Hope this helps
Attachments
cadence1.png
cadence1.png (93.1 KiB) Viewed 2259 times
sylos
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by sylos »

You are indeed correct. Pulseaudio and all its little demons are already installed and cadence solution is pretty self explanatory (I dont have the permissions to view the images you posted).

Thanks for the help. And well done to Kxstudio for managing to have pulseaudio included without it turning into a huge pain when using jack.

Cheers
distrozapper
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by distrozapper »

Hi sylos,
Thanks for the reply. So do your youtubes play nicely again now?
BTW: Thanks for your detailed bug report, it was indeed my first gg hit and made me investigate more.
sylos
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by sylos »

Videos and sound now coming through loud and clear using cadence.

Thank you for the assistance - I definitely wouldn't have figured that out without someone pointing to it.

Cheers
chtfn
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by chtfn »

For the people wondering about this weird new Firefox requirement to play audio, here is the bug report that asks Firefox devs to offer an option *not* to use PulseAudio and stick to ALSA: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661
chtfn
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by chtfn »

Uh this is a pain in the ass... Two questions:

1) Is anyone else having issues installing pulseaudio? I just need to install pulseaudio-module-jack and its dependencies for Firefox 52 to give me sound (as described above) but I get an "unmet dependencies" issue with apt-get install:

Code: Select all

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 pulseaudio-module-jack : Depends: pulseaudio but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
If I use aptitude, I get some more info:

Code: Select all

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pulseaudio : Depends: libpulse0 (= 1:4.0-0ubuntu11.1) but 1:4.0-0ubuntu11.1+kxstudio1 is installed.
Not sure how to proceed.

2) If I install the required PulseAudio stuff to make Firefox work properly, will there be potential consequences on my audio setup? I am not up to scratch with how ALSA and PulseAudio cohabit, but I have read here and in lots of other places that PulseAudio is an annoyance when it comes to low latency and clean audio setups.

Cheers
tseaver
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by tseaver »

In my setup (UbuntuStudio 16.10 + KX), jackd "owns" the USB interface, and the PA-jackd bridge sets up a PA source / sink which corresponds to its default capture / playback ports. The only tweak I had to make was to configure qjackctl such that, after starting jackd, it nudges PA to make the jack sink the default output in the "Options" > "Execute script after Startup" field:

Code: Select all

pactl set-default-sink jack_out
Ubuntu, Mixbus32C; acoustic blues / country / jazz
chtfn
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by chtfn »

Hey FalkTX, not sure if you feel like it at all (and what you think about the decision Firefox devs made), but do you think you could chime in in this discussion? -> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... RAqSTri66I

Cheers
Lyberta
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by Lyberta »

Just wanted to say that I can only select correct audio outputs if I have PulseAudio installed. I've never had problems with it.
chtfn
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Re: Youtube sound issues following firefox upgrade

Post by chtfn »

falkTX wrote:You might not like my opinion though.
we should get over the unrational fear of pulseaudio, it's good software and it's here to stay.

the pulseaudio "haters" are a vocal minority. most people just want working audio out of the box, and that's what pulseaudio does - most of time.
jack and pulseaudio can live happily together, much more than jack and raw alsa apps.
Great, thank you for your reply! Coming from you, I am happy with that statement. I was coming from hearing all the pulseaudio complaints, and you providing an ISO for a base system working without pulseaudio at all. I assumed there was a good reason to leave pulseaudio out of a vanilla KXStudio install.

Cheers
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