Re: Audio output from firefox

[scole_mail <scole_mail%gmx.com@localhost>]

I just spent some time experimenting with this, but I am using stable
i386, and pkgsrc-2016Q4/firefox-50.1.0.  I had troubles also with sound
when the default switched from pulseaudio to alsa.  When I build firefox
with the current default options (alsa dbus), sound doesn't work.

I think there were some old threads in netbsd-users mentioning you need
to maybe install alsa-plugins-oss and/or alsa-plugins-pulse, and
configure an ~/.asoundrc file properly.  I think alsa-lib and alsa-utils
might be useful to have as well.  This seems too complicated for me.

I tried to build firefox with oss using these options:
 env PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS="-alsa dbus oss -pulseaudio"
Sound would work, but only on that one tab.  If I closed that first tab,
or tried to play sound on a new tab, it stopped working.

So I tried firefox with pulseaudio:
 env PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS="-alsa dbus pulseaudio"
This allowed sound in multiple tabs and can play concurrent sounds with
other programs, like mplayer.
 
I still get occasional errors like:
 W: [(null)] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.

but readjusting the volume seems to fix it.

I saw sound was being working on in current, so I'm not sure if the same
problems exist, but for the least fussy setup, pulseaudio seemed best to
me.

If alsa is the firefox default sound option now, maybe the package
should display some of message with example setup on how to configure it
properly upon installation if it can't be done automagically.

Thanks