Icecat Audio Issues

Hello!

Not sure the issue is with upstream or with guix system.

While streaming/watching movie on some (more than one) websites, audio

has constant cracking sounds and voice of characters in the video

becomes robotic.

When I stream/watch the same movie on ungoogled-chromium, the audio is

just fine.

This issue with Icecat has been there for quite some time (across

multiple updates). I also tried running IceCat on safe-mode and got the

same issue.

INFO: My Guix System and Icecat are up-to-date.

Regards,

RG.

Raghav,

Raghav Gururajan ???

If by ‘robotic’ you mean (extremely) low-pitched then, yes, this

has been the case for roughly the past half year.

I asked around on IRC, even sending URLs to innocent people who

were unable to reproduce the problem, so I then assumed it wasn't

in Guix proper. I almost never watch videos on the Web so I

didn't care much, but you might be happy to learn you're not

alone.

Could you share a (free) example URL?

Kind regards,

T G-R

On Sun, Sep 01, 2019, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Bug reports for GNU Guix wrote:

I believe the cause is "media sources", although I'm not sure

exactly what that is, if you disable it it seems to "fix" the issue.

I found this solution from some old firefox bug reports that seemed to describe

similar audio distortions.

A good site to test it on is nicovideo.jp, since on other sites if I

disable mediasources the videos just refuse to play altogether.

So for example here is a reference video, I simply clicked the first

video I saw and it reproduces the audio distortion:

When I play it the audio is very low pitch and crackly. However, if

I open about:config (just enter about:config into the address bar),

search for "mediasource", and then double click

"media.mediasource.enabled" so it shows false, then reload the video

and it plays perfectly without any distortion.

As I mentioned though, most sites seem to not like it when

mediasource is disabled, so it's not a perfect solution, but at

least it shows where the problem lies.

Ison,

Thanks so much for your answer!

ison ???

Indeed: my sole use case for Web video seems to insist on whatever

this feature is. I can't link to it here for freedom & legal

reasons, but let's say their content is *majorly* ball-based.

With .mediasource disabled, I get an error:

“Your browser does not support the playback of this video.

Please try using a different browser.”

I'd really rather not.

I remember getting this same error in Epiphany when I tried to

play it there. At least now I have a lead…

Thanks again,

T G-R

I'm not sure, but this could be related to playing media files with DRM.

If I recall correctly, last year, when I visited any news post on https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/on Debian 9 using Firefox ESR, the browser would ask me to enable DRM. If I answered NO, then I would see the

“Your browser does not support the playback of this video.

Please try using a different browser.”

message (or a similar message) instead of videos, and the audio player would display blank (the player that should show up when clicking the big dark blue button that says ???????). If I enabled DRM, the media would play fine.

Visiting the same website now that I use IceCat on the Guix system I get the distorted sound in videos and no audio player.

I wonder if people using IceCat in other distributions have the same problem. I was going to report this issue to Gnuzilla, but it seems their mailing list is not very active.

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merge 37244 38047

quit

merge 37244 40170

I also have this problem with icecat. With ungoogled-chromuim the video

is scrambled. I wonder if the two issues are possible related.

On 9/1/19 1:15 PM, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Bug reports for GNU Guix wrote:

FWIW, I encounter this in IceCat, but not in Firefox, maybe somehow

Firefox->IceCat introduces some audio bug.

Greetings,

Maxime.

Hi,

I found a test case that could be shared:

In https://hls-js.netlify.app/demo, if viewed with IceCat (but not with

Firefox), the audio is somewhat off (not low pitch, but something else?).

This seems to be a demo for "MPEG-2 Transport Streams", and for the

video where I noticed low pitch, going by the 'network' tab, MPEG-TS was

used.

Greetings,

Maxime.

I found an apparently similar report for yt-dlp:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/4280.

One of the differences between Firefox and IceCat is the default value

of the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" setting in <about:config>. The

default in Firefox is "false", and the default in IceCat is "true".

I've found that some audio/video players that misbehave in IceCat will

start working correctly if you set "privacy.resistFingerprinting" to

"false". It might be worth a try.

Mark

--

Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice

but very few check the facts. Ask me about https://stallmansupport.org.

On 30-09-2022 05:08, Mark H Weaver wrote:

That avoids the 'low pitch' issue for me.

Greetings,

Maxime.