1681491 - [Ubuntu] AAC audio playback is not working on Fraunhofer test site

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Attachment: aac audio problem.webm

Affected versions

• Firefox 78.6.0 ESR (snap package)
• Firefox 84.0
• Firefox 85.0a1

Affected platforms

• Ubuntu 20.04

Steps to reproduce

1. Launch Firefox
2. Access this test page
3. Click Play on any AAC audio

Expected result

• The audio file plays

Actual result

• The audio is not playing and the time lenght is changed to 0:00

Regression range

• Will see for a regression

Additional notes

• The issue can be seen in the attachment.
• Firefox Nightly and 84.0 will play only "Original Wave File" while ESR 78.6.0 will not play anything at all.
• Seems that FLAC, MP3, OGG audio files are affected too.
• Some errors are thrown in Web Console as well:
  Media resource https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/ChID-BLITS-EBU-Narration.mp4 could not be decoded. multichannel.html
  All candidate resources failed to load. Media load paused. multichannel.html
  Media resource https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/ChID-BLITS-EBU-Narration.mp4 could not be decoded, error: Error Code: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_MEDIASINK_ERR (0x806e000b)
  Details: OnMediaSinkAudioError

Suggested severity

• S2

Comment 1

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

I'm not able to reproduce this issue on Ubuntu 20.04 with latest Nightly 85.01a1. All audio files on that page can be playback correctly. In addition, I'm also able to play FLAC, mp3 and ogg.

Do you have ffmpeg installed in your desktop? It's required to have ffmpeg on your system in order to use its Libavcodec to decode audio.

If you have already install ffmpeg in your desktop, could you help me to get the log MOZ_LOG=PlatformDecoderModule:5 and provide the information from your about:support?
Thank you.

Comment 2

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Attachment: no ffmpeg.png

Seems that ffmpeg is not installed and wouldn't let me either install it (tried adding the usb drive with focal fossa too and it won't see it). But there's a question, why is Chrome able to decode them?

Comment 3

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Because of patent license issue, we are not allowed to include decoder for those files in Firefox, so we're relying on external software to decode those files. On Windows and MacOS, they provide native decoders which we can use directly. Linux doesn't have such decoder, so we're not able to decode those files without ffmpeg help.

You can install ffmpeg directly from apt [1]. As this issue can be solved after installing ffmpeg, I'm going to close this bug.

[1] https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-ffmpeg-on-ubuntu-20-04/