Firefox does not play HTML5 audio [SOLVED]

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kitsunenokenja · Post by **kitsunenokenja** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 3:29 am

Cannot find any info about this problem. All HTML5 videos will play but no audio comes out. Flash works fine though. It's FF 24.0-r1 with gstreamer flag on, and gstreamer 0.10.36 installed, with the following:

media-libs/gst-plugins-bad
media-libs/gst-plugins-base
media-libs/gst-plugins-good
media-libs/gst-plugins-ugly
media-plugins/gst-plugins-a52dec
media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa
media-plugins/gst-plugins-cdparanoia
media-plugins/gst-plugins-dts
media-plugins/gst-plugins-dvdread
media-plugins/gst-plugins-faad
media-plugins/gst-plugins-ffmpeg
media-plugins/gst-plugins-flac
media-plugins/gst-plugins-gio
media-plugins/gst-plugins-lame
media-plugins/gst-plugins-mad
media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta
media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpeg2dec
media-plugins/gst-plugins-ogg
media-plugins/gst-plugins-resindvd
media-plugins/gst-plugins-soup
media-plugins/gst-plugins-taglib
media-plugins/gst-plugins-theora
media-plugins/gst-plugins-v4l2
media-plugins/gst-plugins-vorbis
media-plugins/gst-plugins-x
media-plugins/gst-plugins-x264
media-plugins/gst-plugins-xvid
media-plugins/gst-plugins-xvideo

media.gstreamer.enabled is set to true in about:config

It still doesn't work. html5test.com gives a check for all audio formats on the list. The format (ogg, webm, etc.) doesn't seem to matter as none of them play.

I'm using ALSA not PulseAudio or anything else. Do I need something else from ALSA maybe?

Logicien · Post by **Logicien** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:04 am

Seamonkey and Firefox were unable to play correctly any Html5 audio/video using a Bluetooth headset. The sound was jumping or not playing at all. Worse, the system was freezing with the Flash plugin. Curiously, when the output was the headphone and speakers, they play Html5 audio/video without any problem.

I try all the USE flags setup I could and more for Seamonkey and Firefox, the problem stay. Finally, I decide to install Pulseaudio using the pulseaudio global USE flag. Than Html5 audio/video start to play correctly. I am now trying to use Jack and Nas sound servers as alternatives to Pulseaudio.

I's seem's that Seamonkey and Firefox must not communicate directly with the Alsa drivers and the Bluetooth device on my Gentoo installation. And other curiosity, is that Epiphany and Opera do not have this problem.

On Debian, I don't need Pulseaudio to have a good output with Html5 on my Bluetooth headset. Iceape and Iceweasel work well with Alsa, but I have not been able to mix the audio with Dmix in Bluetooth, who work when the output is the headphone and speakers. So a sound server resolv my Html5 problem and sound mixing in Bluetooth. It's look like help Flash too. It have'nt freeze since then.

kitsunenokenja · Post by **kitsunenokenja** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:27 pm

Here's the funny part. It was working fine before I upgraded to kernel 3.11.4. I had to upgrade because in 3.10.7 the elantech ps/2 touchpad extensions didn't work right.

I'm not sure how going to 3.11 broke it. I recompiled all of gstreamer and firefox itself. Still no clue what's wrong.

kitsunenokenja · Post by **kitsunenokenja** » Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:23 am

One major change is the number of ALSA devices is no longer the same with this kernel. Previously I had some odd entry that had no usable interfaces as card 0 and card 1 was my actual intel-hda device. Now, it's just card 0 being my actual card. I had ~/.asoundrc stating my default card was 1 instead of 0; fixing that instantly solved the HTML5 audio issue. So it was never the audio support, it was just misdirected to the wrong (in this case, non-existent) ALSA device.

I discovered this when Clementine suddenly told me that it couldn't open the audio device and I knew that was not possible. Funny how problems are solved sometimes.