252851 - ALSA should be option for sound output

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Lee Revell]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040722 Debian/1.7.1-3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040722 Debian/1.7.1-3

Mozilla currently appears to use the deprecated OSS sound API.  This is
supported on modern systems via ALSA's OSS emulation, but this is buggy compared
to the using the native ALSA API.  One problem this causes is audio latency
spikes in other applications, which lead to buffer underruns due to an issue
with  snd_pcm_oss_ioctl().

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Launch mozilla.

Actual Results:  
Sound device is opened in OSS emulation mode

Expected Results:  
Sound device is opened using native ALSA functions

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mozilla just uses esd.  We don't do any raw sound device or sound API access...

Comment 2

[R.K.Aa.]

Please don't even consider implementing anything ALSA. ALSA doesn't work for me
(Fedora) Only spews out error messages on load, and not a single CD player app
works, apart from XINE. Sound in Mozilla and plugins are OK. 

There are redhat bugs about it too;
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=125944

"Don't fix it if it ain't broken". Mozilla shouldn't break older installations
anyway.

Comment 3

[Lee Revell]

Sounds like a Red Hat problem to me.  Is in in the ALSA bug tracker?  If not
then it isn't an ALSA bug.

ALSA is the future, everything will HAVE to support it eventually.  If
applications have buggy ALSA support, there is plenty of documentation for them
to fix it.

Anyway, I think this is a problem with the Macromedia flash plugin.  I doubt
they will ever fix it.

Comment 4

[R.K.Aa.]

Which version of Flash are you having problems with?

Comment 5

[Lee Revell]

Version 7.  The Debian unstable package is flashplugin-nonfree 7.0.25-4.

Comment 6

[Dawid Gajownik]

Yes, ALSA should be supported. One of the reason is ability to do software
mixing without need to have sound deamon - DMix plugin in alsalib will do the job.

In some day OSS will be removed from kernel (sooner or later) :)

Comment 7

[Lee Revell]

I don't think Mozilla opens the sound
device at all, the offender was the flashplayer plugin.

I do think Mozilla should support <OBJECT> tags with embedded .wav
files, just to support this:

http://getyourasstomars.com/
http://english.ytmnd.com/

But that is a different issue.  Besides, the ALSA issue that caused xruns when
an application used the OSS emulation ioctls is fixed now.

Comment 8

[Borg Drone]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I don't think Mozilla opens the sound
> device at all, the offender was the flashplayer plugin.

and what about Mail notification?
If it's using 'play' to play whatever wave file you input in the option, then
that 's a design flaw. What if you have aplay?
Running oss emulation just to use oss play is not right as you'd have to have
oss emulation and have to have play. There's no guarantee that that's always there.

Symlinking play to aplay also doesn't work because aplay pukes if you do that.