I have encountered an issue with sound when watching videos on Floatplane. My audio seem to enter a sort of error state where sound gets heavily distorted and continues being distorted until a reboot has happened.
The issue has only been observed on Floatplane, YouTube and my local video player is fine.
The issue manifests itself when using the 3 sound interfaces I’ve tested: Bose 700 (bluetooth), onboard audio (aux) and audioengine D1 USB DAC (aux).
The systems are as following:
Laptop:
Lenovo ThinkPad X230 w/ Intel Core i5-3320M
Desktop:
MoBo: ASUS Prime Z270-A
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K
RAM: 16 GB Corsair Vengence (single DIMM)
GPU: ASUS DirectCU II GTX 770
Both running Ubuntu 18.04 with Firefox and both has the issue.
Would anyone happen to have an idea of where and how to start the debug process for this issue?
I had this issue in ArchLinux and Debian (SID) when I was running Firefox 73 initially. I run the Nightly FireFox builds. It seems to go away on the 3rd to last update of the 73 build. I had no issues with the 74 build and We just got moved to the 75 build last week.
@Dynamic_Gravity
Now I have, it does not seem to solve the issue. Sadly.
@Mastic_Warrior
I’m running stable and therefore currently Firefox 73.0.
Your questioned made me realize, I had not tried in any browser besides Firefox. I installed Chromium and tried there. The issue does not seem to arise in Chromium. This could indicate that it is Firefox-specific and from your account, it will potentially be fixed in a couple of weeks with Firefox 74.
Yeah pretty much. I had reported it and I was not the only one apparently. I think Beta is on 74 currently if you want to try it.
At first I thought the issue was web render as I had turned that on the week before the issue happened but after turning web render off, that did not fix the issue. I then turned web render on and and in the next few days of updates, the issue went away.
In my experience, with all the work that is going on in FF, you tend to benefit better from the Beta branch than stable. Nightly may be a little too much as there is at least one update a day and sometimes you have to revert to the previous update because something seriously broke. Like when they first added Wayland support.
I tried adding the PPA for vnext, but the issue seem to persist in Firefox 74.0b8. I will wait for 75 to hit beta and see if the issue is resolved there. Until then, I will keep Chromium for Floatplane and cry every time I look for the PIP button.
If you are thinking of downloading the video and playing it locally, I have been doing so, although with GNOME Videos, but this creates a whole new set of issues.
If you’re suggesting that Firefox is using a VLC-related library for video playback, then I can confirm that VLC plays the downloaded videos just fine.
I suggest nothing. I am asking only out of curiosity.
Since you are using Chromium for FP, I thought about vlc in a similar way as I use on my tablet to watch youtube. Newpipe as a content viewer, but video playback just on vlc with live stream without any previous download.
And I asked because I don’t have FP and I’m wondering if they are using some more sophisticated ways of providing a data stream that could cause problems to play a stream data in vlc in the same way as you can with YT.
And instead of using a second browser specifically for FP, still use FF as a content navigator for FP and leave video playback for vlc. Although this is obviously no solution to the original problem, it’s just a loose thinking.
@TimHolus
Interesting, but I believe VLC should somehow receive a session cookie from Firefox or authenticate itself and I am not sure that is possible.
@nx2l
Is Fedora using a different audio stack than Ubuntu? Because then maybe it is a Ubuntu-Firefox-specific issue then.
It also occurred to me, for this I had such a question.
Maybe try with codecs … Occasionally on YT I have problems with audio synchronization with saved streams that were live. For some reason, sometimes YT when forcing VP9 / opus sound does not always have good synchronization, but it is enough to block and allow only h264 (avc / opus) and audio is ok. I don’t know what combination of video / audio FP uses but maybe try something similar. Unfortunately, enhanced-h264ify will only work with YT.
@TimHolus
Gee, I’m not that knowledgeable about the Floatplane format. Unlike YouTube, I do not think they run a separate video and audio stream which is then mixed on playback. If this is true, I am not sure you can choose audio codecs.
Just a quick update. Now 1½ years later, running Ubuntu 20.04, I still had the same issue until recently as I replaced PulseAudio with PipeWire and my issues are gone.
