choppy sound with firefox on linux

[manuel-mauky]

Hi everyone,
I realy like your the idea of your project but I have some problems with your demos. When I'm playing the demos with firefox on linux the sound is realy
choppy and I don't know what the reason is. I have a core i7 cpu and the load factor is below 10% so I don't think it's a performance problem.

When I'm trying the demos with the chromium browser everything works fine. Same for firefox on windows. Only the combination of firefox + linux is problematically.

A friend of mine had the same problem with the same combination firefox+linux.

Is this a known problem?

My firefox version is 15.0.1
I'm using linux mint 13 which is based on ubuntu 12.04.
I don't know what other informations might help you.

[devongovett]

Yep, we've noticed this as well. Unfortunately it appears Firefox on Linux has some serious audio bugs. We'll look into it more, but the solution may be fixing bugs in Firefox rather than here. Thanks for opening a bug though!

[graue]

Just wanted to report this affects me too on Firefox 16.0.1, Ubuntu 12.10 on x86-64. The Aurora.js audio demo is the first one I can recall having this kind of problem with — several games that use HTML5 audio have worked perfectly on this setup. I trust you if you think it's a Firefox bug, but if so, this must be hitting an edge case or something. Is there anything relevant on the FF Bugzilla?

[manuel-mauky]

I found this one on the Firefox Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798417

In version 18.0 alpha of firefox this problem is still there.

[crackofdusk]

For the record, I get smooth playback with Firefox 16.0.2 and 18.0.a2 on Linux on all demos at http://labs.official.fm/codecs/

[duckinator]

Firefox 16.0.2 on Linux Mint, incredibly choppy.

[manuel-mauky]

Today I tried the demos with firefox 19.0a2 and it was working perfectly. Apparently the firefox developers have fixed the problem in the alpha version.

[graue]

While broken in Firefox 18 release, the demos work fine in Firefox 20.0a2/Linux for me, with one caveat: if I switch to another tab, then the sound begins stuttering badly. I suspect Firefox imposes stricter CPU usage limits on background tabs and the decoder can't keep up. Does the same happen in Firefox on OSX/Windows?

Anyway, as long as the tab is in the foreground, this has been fixed for me sometime between Firefox 18 release and 20.0a2. Tested the MP3 and FLAC demos, did not try the others but would expect similar results.

[crackofdusk]

This is no longer an issue in recent versions of Firefox for Linux.