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!
>

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