My firefox-54.0 was build with the default 'oss' option, sound is working well, I have never noticed any problems. I do have pulseaudio installed as mplayer dependency, though (mplayer also works fine). I also use vlc (video works for about a minute, then stops with no dump), xmms (crashes immediately) and moc (works fine), there are a few other players built which I haven't bothered to test yet. This all is on amd64 -current, running on an old Thinkpad t61p. I actually have many more problems with sound under Linux on the same laptop (I rarely run it these days, after I managed to get NetBSD run properly on it). I never really had any problems with sound on this laptop so far.
Chavdar Ivanov On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 at 23:07 Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com> wrote: > > So, just a few years ago, we had to have flash (a security nightmare) > setup and working to do things like play a youtube video. That sucked > because you never knew when someone was going to bend flash over and 0wn > your system. My best defense was click-to-play plugins so flash only > loaded when I needed it. That worked, at least. It didn't play nice with > the sound device and often wouldn't release it until I closed the browser, > but it was servicable. > > Fast forward a few years when sites started to pull their head out of > their flash and embrace HTML5 and the in-browser streaming video standards > that had only been sitting there a decade or so. I'm thinking "YEA!" no > more flash, right? Plus, Gecko browsers are open source, so they ought to > embrace more than one sound output meathod, right? ESD, Jack1, Jack2, > Arts, OSS, Alsa, NAS, etc.. WRONG. > > Well, I was half right. Sites like Youtube seem to work in just about all > our Mozilla-based browsers (Seamonkey, Firefox*). However, there seems to > be NO CHOICE about what kind of sound device to output to. It's Pulseaudio > or nothing, I guess. Well, my opinion is that Pulseaudio is a miserable > failure at everything it does, since that's been my experience. I've got > three NetBSD systems it fails to work on altogether, or has severe > drawbacks (like it won't release the sound device - EVER, or it won't work > unless it's run as root, despite 666 perms on the audio devs). Plus, > nobody seems to want to *fix* Pulseaudio. Anyone who complains is an > idiot, according to Pottering or his ilk. > > Is there ANY way to get sound via a browser without Pulseaudio ? Today I > resort to downloading with youtube-dl or something similar and playing the > resulting file with mplayer because at least that gives me enough > flexibility to choose my sound output and not break it (which Pulseaudio > does OFTEN by grabbing the sound device, refusing to release it, and being > unkillable even with kill -9 - must reboot after that). > > Is there any other option besides taking more abuse from Pulseaudio or > doing the plugin-download-play-from-CLI option ? I'm using amd64 and i386 > ports. Is there a version in the panopoly of firefox versions that has > anything-other-than-pulseaudio as an option for sound output that can > still do HTML5 video? Has anyone found a formula that works and doesn't > ruin the sound device until the end of time just because I played one > HTML5 video? > > -Swift > > I'm even using SeamlessRDP to run browsers from Windows boxes. Ugh. Bleh. > Puh. but at least I know 'rdesktop' will release the sound device! >
