1955839 - Disruption in music playback when switching tab to X/Twitter

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video: cubeb, defect, P2)

Description

[RK]

Attachment: firefox.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox 136.0.1 (64-bit) on Ubuntu Linux

1.Play Youtube/Youtube Music, and concurrently open a new X/Twitter story in a different tab
2. I was unable to reproduce this with any other website - Instagram, Hacker News, other youtube videos. Only happens with X.
3. Also not able to reproduce with Firefox Nightly 137.0a1 (2025-02-24) (64-bit)

The system is well provisioned CPU/GPU wise.

Actual results:

The audio playback is disrupted for a fraction of a second

Turned on logging to file through about:logging and tried getting log samples. When the audio gets disrupted, I can see the Stream coming to a stop and indicating that Draining is in progress. I'm attaching the log file this same.

Expected results:

Audio should not be disrupted.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Audio/Video: Playback' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jimm, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 4

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

See dupe bug 2016063 for more detail.

Comment 5

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

I'm unable to reproduce this locally. Given the cubeb logs show the audio stream draining, that suggests the audio is being stopped from the content side for some reason. It'd be useful to have a broader set of logs to give us a better view of what's happening in this situation.

@RK and @Kitsu - would you mind collecting some additional logs for us to confirm exactly what's happening, please?

If you follow the instructions in https://paul.cx/public/about-logging-presentation.webm to enable audio logs, that will start the Firefox profiler recording (toolbar icon will glow) and capture the needed logs. Once that's done, reproduce the bug, then stop the profiler recording by clicking the glowing icon. That'll open a new tab with the profiler results - click "Upload Local Profile" then "Upload" and share the link in this bug please.

Comment 7

[Fernando Marcelino Muniz]

I started playing "The Hampster Dance Song" on YouTube, opened a tweet two times from my own profile by wheel-clicking them.
That resulted in the music being muted for 1 second twice.

https://share.firefox.dev/4uNiFBD

Comment 8

[Kitsu]

For me, when I open or refresh Twitter/X tab, the Youtube video's audio keeps running but the videos pauses for a split second.

https://share.firefox.dev/4c0T8h4

Comment 9

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Thanks, that's much appreciated!

@Fernando I can see the problem in this case, it's a Linux-specific bug and it's likely the same as @RK's issue but it would still be good to have a profile from them to check as well. Working on a fix for this now.

@Kitsu I'll reopen your original bug since it's clear this is a different issue, not a dupe of this one. I don't know the root cause yet, but I see from the profile audio continues playing fine but video decode freezes for ~500ms.

Comment 10

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Attachment: GitHub Pull Request

Comment 11

[Fernando Marcelino Muniz]

So it's a PulseAudio workaround that becomes a issue for PipeWire?

Comment 12

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Firefox uses the PulseAudio API on Linux right now; PulseAudio -> PipeWire compatibility is handled by pipewire-pulse. The fix I linked is removing an unnecessary delay in Gecko's PulseAudio backend when stopping audio streams; the delay wasn't a workaround for anything related to PulseAudio or PipeWire, only internal implementation details.

Comment 13

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

Attachment: Bug 1955839 - Update cubeb-pulse-rs to c0b3bce1f1d1cc565a2ccacd9c38e945ef8d033c. r?#cubeb-reviewers

Comment 14

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:karlt, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 15

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/54c559dc77b9
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a38c72d2b268
Update cubeb-pulse-rs to c0b3bce1f1d1cc565a2ccacd9c38e945ef8d033c.  r=cubeb-reviewers,pehrsons

Comment 16

[Silaghi Andreea]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a38c72d2b268