On Sun, Sep 01, 2019, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Bug reports for GNU Guix wrote: > > If by ‘robotic’ you mean (extremely) low-pitched then, yes, this has been > the case for roughly the past half year. > > I asked around on IRC, even sending URLs to innocent people who were unable > to reproduce the problem, so I then assumed it wasn't in Guix proper. I > almost never watch videos on the Web so I didn't care much, but you might be > happy to learn you're not alone. > > Could you share a (free) example URL?
I believe the cause is "media sources", although I'm not sure exactly what that is, if you disable it it seems to "fix" the issue. I found this solution from some old firefox bug reports that seemed to describe similar audio distortions. A good site to test it on is nicovideo.jp, since on other sites if I disable mediasources the videos just refuse to play altogether. So for example here is a reference video, I simply clicked the first video I saw and it reproduces the audio distortion: https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm35513757 When I play it the audio is very low pitch and crackly. However, if I open about:config (just enter about:config into the address bar), search for "mediasource", and then double click "media.mediasource.enabled" so it shows false, then reload the video and it plays perfectly without any distortion. As I mentioned though, most sites seem to not like it when mediasource is disabled, so it's not a perfect solution, but at least it shows where the problem lies.
