1500525 - Ogg media resource could not be decoded

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P5)

Description

[Davyd McColl]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0

Steps to reproduce:

If AudioContext worked reliably, we wouldn't even be here -- but I find that it doesn't, and that's led to certain ogg files being apparently not decodable

TL;DR:
attempt to load https://mynoise.net/Data/BOWLS/7b.ogg -- you get a "player" in Firefox, but you can't play. There's an error about how the media can't be decoded.

Longer story, involving AudioContext
1. Visit https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/singingBowlsDroneGenerator.php -- this works on windows, but the gentoo Firefox build doesn't work (may be a build issue, so then please ignore)
1. Disable AudioContext, to force fallback html5 audio (I have a greasemonkey script to do so)
2. Load mynoise.net, go to singing bowls generator: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/singingBowlsDroneGenerator.php
3. No sound -- same issue as logged above: media can't be decoded.

NB: this issue is about ogg media decoding issues, NOT that AudioContext isn't working for me. I fully accept that the gentoo build of Firefox may be doing something odd whereby AudioContext doesn't work as expected; however, in fallback html5 mode, valid ogg files can't be decoded -- that's what this issue is about, because that's more interesting to the firefox project (I think)


Actual results:

No audio


Expected results:

Should get audio

Comment 1

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

I'm not able to reproduce.

With 62.0b18 and Nightly 2018-10-16-22 amd64 Linux, loading https://mynoise.net/Data/BOWLS/7b.ogg presents a player that appears to play silence.  I don't see any error message.  Google Chrome 70.0.3538.54 behaves similarly.

FWIW I hear https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/singingBowlsDroneGenerator.php in a Gentoo build from a firefox-62.0_beta18.ebuild based on firefox-62.0_beta6.ebuild from the "mozilla" overlay.

Comment 2

[Davyd McColl]

hm, I get the same behavior as you on windows -- perhaps there's something about some of the files on mynoise.net.

As an aside, I'm also running Gentoo -- I use overlays for a few things, but I'm not entirely sure how I would prioritise the mozilla overlay above the builds available in the gentoo main repo -- how do you do it? One "caveat" is that I don't use PulseAudio -- I know that's not normal for the mainline Firefox development branch and that Gentoo adds in patches to allow me to keep that off of my system at my choice -- can I still build without PA from the mozilla overlay? (I've added the overlay and run `equery u`, but I'm not sure how to specify which repo to query use flags against -- `equery u www-client/firefox::mozilla` doesn't seem to be right: I can change the bit after "::" to anything and still get an output)

Sorry to be a time-sink.

(I also understand that stuff from that overlay gets merged back into the main gentoo repo at some point, so I'm not sure if it's worth it to do so, but I'd like to try, partly for the experience of promoting an overlay over the main repo, and partly to see if there is significant difference)

Comment 3

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

layman seems to configure /etc/portage/repos.conf/layman.conf with a priority.
I don't know about alsa support.  The use flags may provide a clue.

Comment 4

[Davyd McColl]

Just for completeness, in case anyone else comes here:

1. as you stated, overlays have a priority; the missing piece for me is that the main repo has a priority as well: 1000. Overlays are processed in order of highest priority, where a smaller number is a higher priority. So I have the mozilla overlay at priority 50 (which is pretty-much what all my overlays are at), which trumps the main repo at 1000 -- so problem solved about "where will the package come from"
2. the mozilla overlay also has the `pulseaudio` use flag -- and since I have that off system-wide, the build respected my preferences and I ended up with Firefox working perfectly against ALSA
3. the current main overlay Firefox version is 62.0.3; I don't have any accept_keywords against www-client/firefox (though I do against the build dependencies, eg rust), and `equery y firefox` shows that the mozilla overlay is providing 63.0 for stable, so the rebuild has also updated me from 62.0.3 to 63.0. I gather either gentoo and mozilla have different definitions of "stable" or 63.0 is coming Real Soon Now to the gentoo repos
4. Not only do I have sound, but my original issue of not experiencing WebAudio sound on mynoise.net generators has been alleviated, which makes me really, really happy. I have a fairly robust dose of permanent tinnitus and these noise generators can be the difference between focus and madness.

Thanks for all your help and the time spent investigating this issue.