255283 - Flash uses obsolete OSS audio interface

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(External Software Affecting Firefox Graveyard :: Flash (Adobe), defect)

Description

[Yusuf Goolamabbas]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040812 Firefox/0.9.1+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040812 Firefox/0.9.1+

With the latest Fedora Core 2 kernel, I get a lot of these messages in
/var/log/messages
application firefox-bin uses obsolete OSS audio interface

Don't recollect seeing such messages before. Maybe this kernel has some changes
in the OSS/ALSA stack

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Startup firefox and visit this page
2. http://www.itv.com/citv
3. I think the Flash/Shockwave plugin causes the messages
Actual Results:  
you see the message 

application firefox-bin uses obsolete OSS audio interface

in /var/log/messages

Comment 1

[Michael Favia]

I keep getting these error messages too. Fedora Core 2 updated via nightly "yum
update". I also get them from a nmber of other aplications including mplayer. Im
imagining it is just the fedora folks trying to move everone along to ALSA. Just
a confirmaion from here though. Sorry not at linux machine for firefox version
but it is latest rpm from dag wieers

Comment 2

[Yusuf Goolamabbas]

Changing component to OS integration and marking version as trunk

Comment 3

[Stuart Parmenter]

This isn't really a firefox issue as much as a Macromedia Flash issue.

Comment 4

[Martin Meyer]

I see that this bug hasn't been touched in a while, so I'm wondering: is there a
way to report to Macromedia that Flash should be fixed to use alsa?  I've never
had to report a bug to them before but I'd be willing to write them if someone
can point me in the right direction.

Is there any time when Firefox actually does make sound or is that exclusively
done by plugins?  Are there any other commonly-used plugins that output to OSS
instead of alsa?

Comment 5

[S Egbert]

Does ALSA OSS wrapper (aoss) works with firefox?

I had trouble putting 'aoss' somewhere in the myriad labyrinth of the mozilla-*.sh shell scripting jungles.

Comment 6

[Michelle Sintov]

Thanks for alerting me of this. The Flash Player team will investigate.

Comment 7

[Mike Melanson]

I don't quite understand how using a legacy interface is a bug. It could be that the FC folks want to encourage a move to ALSA. But is there a plan to remove OSS entirely? I checked the /var/log/messages file on my FC machine and, as other users have seen, the same message shows up for any program that touched the OSS API.

Also, is ALSA the de facto standard Linux sound interface? Can other APIs (OSS, ESD, arts) be safely disregarded?

Comment 8

[S Egbert]

Please check https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255283 for more details.

Comment 9

[Philip Withnall (unavailable)]

*** Bug 327411 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Michelle Sintov]

S Egbert: Do you mean, we should check bug 327411 for details?

Comment 11

[S Egbert]

Adding a line to the /usr/bin/firefox shell script fixed this problem.

# vi /usr/bin/firefox
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

If you are currently using other sound servers, the following may work for you:
FIREFOX_DSP="artsdsp"   # for ARTS
FIREFOX_DSP="esddsp"    # for ESD sound server
FIREFOX_DSP="alsa"      # for ALSA sound server
FIREFOX_DSP="auto"      # to let Firefox determine which one is first

Too bad, we don't have the following option yet:

FIREFOX_DSP="jackd"     # JACK Audio Connection Kit (ultra-low latency sound server)

Comment 12

[John Talbut]

Usung aoss does not exactly fix the problem.  It is a workaround for applications that still use oss.

Comment 13

[Martin Meyer]

When using aoss I had trouble with audio sync.  Going to Homestarrunnner and watching some strong bad emails was kinda painful because the audio and video were at completely different points.

A quick check at lwn tells me that the kernel maintainers are trying to remove and oss drivers for hardware that already has alsa drivers.  The result of this will be that only old hardware will work with OSS pretty soon. Also, the original decision to deprecate OSS was made 4 years ago. [http://lwn.net/Articles/189953/]

I think Gstreamer might be the best answer here, since it will allow a system-wide preference for which audio output method to use.  Why use specifically OSS or Alsa or Jackd when you can insert an intermediate layer which could use any of them?

Comment 14

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

As far as I can tell, the latest flash for linux now uses ALSA.