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PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#81

Post by nomel »

AstralStorm wrote: post #64
coconut_crab wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please elaborate further? I think PulseAudio's timer based scheduling is a big improvement over interrupt driven one. Bluetooth audio just works, per application volume control, audio streaming and switching audio sink is painless, you can even configure your resampling algorithm. Even if you use pure ALSA you still have to use a sound mixing server (dmix) since most sound cards these days lack hw mixing. Oka…

It breaks on systems with asynchronous drivers. (E.g. recording timed differently from playback) Those are allowed by ALSA APIs and are present in quite a few high profile embedded Linux devices.

> recording timed differently from playback

I'm not familiar with this, and google isn't helping. Do you mean the time between samples, during recording, isn't fixed?

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#82

Post by majewsky »

AstralStorm wrote: post #78
majewsky wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at the actual APIs? After last week's announcement, I talked to a friend who has, and apparently the PulseAudio API is much more straight-forward than the ALSA one. He voiced understanding for Firefox supporting PulseAudio instead of ALSA. EDIT: Also, arguing that Firefox needs to support ALSA instead of PulseAudio because "PulseAudio cannot output to sound devices to ALSA" is similar to saying Firefo…

No, VFS is a valid kernel interface, as is ALSA. Your analogy is wrong and pointless. This is more similar to removing all support for files and requiring everyone to install MySQL.

My argument still stands. There is no law against using user-level interfaces and abstractions that wrap those provided by the kernel.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#83

Post by nirbheek »

CaptSpify wrote: post #57
Zardoz84 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I have a 100% success rate. A single case don't means nothing.

No, but I can demonstrate that there are problems. And judging by others in this thread, I'm not the only one. I find that saying "typically works out of the box for most need." is incorrect.

In open source, an unreported bug doesn't exist. Did you report it upstream?

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#84

Post by kasabali »

rexicus wrote: post #73
journey2 wrote: post #45

On top of the ideological issues I see with things like PulseAudio, it has always given me headaches in practice. I've never had issues with ALSA, but now I need to install an audio server so it can talk to ALSA? These are strange, unfortunate times. I feel linux will eventually succeed at becoming Windows and it makes me sad.

> I've never had issues with ALSA You haven't been acquainted with asoundrc/dmix/alsamixer. ALSA is to Pulse as XFree86 is to Xorg, I feel no nostalgia for it at all.

> ALSA is to Pulse as XFree86 is to Xorg, I feel no nostalgia for it at all.

No it is not. X.org is a fork of XFree86. Pulseaudio is a sound daemon built on top of ALSA.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#85

Post by digi_owl »

kuschku wrote: post #4

Well, what did anyone expect? Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result. It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess s…

> (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%).

Well when they keep alienating their existing user base by chasing after Chrome's tail, and keep spending effort on marketing in the developing world (shades of SJW meddling/signaling in the management, anyone?), while at the same time seem to treat anything but OSX as second fiddle, yeah their market share will tank, and tank hard.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#86

Post by digi_owl »

Twirrim wrote: post #25
kuschku wrote: post #4

Well, what did anyone expect? Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result. It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess s…

> Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). What an utterly ridiculous argument. You're implying that everyone using software has to keep track of every single upstream project, their mailing lists and requests. That doesn't even remotely scale on a persona…

As with anything else, devs only know their own insular world of mailing lists and bug trackers. If it is not showing up on either, it does not exist.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#87

Post by digi_owl »

thehardsphere wrote: post #30
shmerl wrote: post #27

Without going into the whole "to use or not to use PulseAudio" debate, the problem seems to be the fact, that backend which Firefox uses for audio doesn't have anyone who maintains pure ALSA case. So either they need drop pure ALSA support, to find a maintainer or to change the backend. The last two are clearly harder.

Why is it hard to find a maintainer? I mean, is it just a reflection of Firefox's declining popularity or is there some additional difficulty?

Welcome to the concept of CADT. Everyone is off chasing the latest shiny so they can pad their resume (and maybe do a bit of virtue signaling on the side). Its the same crap that has been going on in the Linux GUI world since the formation of Gnome.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#88

Post by digi_owl »

kasabali wrote: post #84
rexicus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never had issues with ALSA You haven't been acquainted with asoundrc/dmix/alsamixer. ALSA is to Pulse as XFree86 is to Xorg, I feel no nostalgia for it at all.

> ALSA is to Pulse as XFree86 is to Xorg, I feel no nostalgia for it at all. No it is not. X.org is a fork of XFree86. Pulseaudio is a sound daemon built on top of ALSA.

And there are times i wish i could roll back the clock to the XFree86 days. At least then you didn't need to herd a stampede of sub-projects to get a working X11 compiled.
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