Re: Audio output from firefox

[manlyphall%manlymail.net@localhost]

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 04:33:53PM -0700, scole_mail wrote:
> 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'm not sure why they would make that the default. Unless the flag has a 
check to ignore the alsa selection when netbsd is detected. Then it 
would support linux users with the default also.
 
> 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.

Pulseaudio will work on Netbsd without alsa.

This is probably a little dated but relevant

https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/using_pulseaudio/

> 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.

The support for shared audio in NetBSD seems to be on the horizon. But 
not there yet.

http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/nb_20161123_2129.html

But FireFox is making pulseaudio a hard dependancy, so this isn't going 
to help much here. I have had your same issue, but only if the audio was 
spawned to close to the termination of the other tabs release of audio. 
The same issue would exsist if you wanted to use mplayer while the audio 
is still unreleased by the FireFox tab. I just dislike pulseaudio that 
much.  

> 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

I won't argue there. Often times there is a reason for things like this, 
the reason just doesn't apply to my needs. Sometimes it just needs 
someone to mention it.