Arch Linux

PopeRigby

Member

Registered: 2019-10-19

Posts: 110

Video playback through Firefox and system wide audio keeps breaking

I feel like this is happening at least once a day. I'll be using Firefox, and all of a sudden videos won't play. The just get stuck on the loading screen. It's not just YouTube, no video across the web will play. However, videos that I have stored on my drive will play just fine through VLC. At the same time audio will stop working in all media players, and games, except for some strange reason Audacity. After I reboot, everything is back to normal.

I haven't really been able to find a pattern to when this is happening, just that it seems to be at least once a day. Rebooting my computer always fixes it. What logs should I provide to diagnose this?

Here's my system info:

[System]
Kernel:          5.7.3-arch1-1
Desktop:         KDE
Display Server:  x11

[CPU]
Vendor:          GenuineIntel
Model:           Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
Physical cores:  4
Logical cores:   8

[Memory]
RAM:             15.6 GB
Swap:            16.0 GB

[Graphics]
Vendor:          X.Org
OpenGL Renderer: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (NAVI10, DRM 3.37.0, 5.7.3-arch1-1, LLVM 10.0.0)
OpenGL Version:  4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.1.1
OpenGL Core:     4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.1.1
OpenGL ES:       OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 20.1.1
Vulkan:          Supported

Edit: I'm also getting these errors in Godot engine:

E 0:00:00.197   init_device: Condition "status < 0" is true. Returned: ERR_CANT_OPEN
  <C++ Source>  drivers/alsa/audio_driver_alsa.cpp:83 @ init_device()
W 0:00:00.197   initialize: All audio drivers failed, falling back to the dummy driver.
  <C++ Source>  servers/audio_server.cpp:211 @ initialize()

Last edited by PopeRigby (2020-06-19 23:50:19)

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"I even found myself driving by convenience stores... that weren't on the way home."

Ropid

Member

Registered: 2015-03-09

Posts: 1,069

Re: Video playback through Firefox and system wide audio keeps breaking

Is this something that developed at some point, or is it a problem that was always there? If it's something that just started showing up at some point, can you remember the date? You could then hunt through the pacman.log file and see what was updated around that date. This command line here filters the log file to just the package changes:

grep -E '\] (ins|upg|rem)\w+ ' /var/log/pacman.log | less +G

I don't know how to fix this kind of thing, but there was a time where I had audio problems after a suspend/resume. Instead of rebooting to fix it, I found out I could restart the audio hardware with a script:

#!/bin/bash

[[ $UID = 0 ]] || exec sudo "$0"

LC_ALL=C lspci -D |
grep '^\S* Audio device:' |
while read -r pci_id rest; do
    echo 1 > "/sys/bus/pci/devices/$pci_id/remove"
done
sleep 1
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan

PopeRigby

Member

Registered: 2019-10-19

Posts: 110

Re: Video playback through Firefox and system wide audio keeps breaking

I can't exactly remember when it started happening. Probably should have kept track of that. Maybe a week or two ago? I'll try looking through the pacman logs. I'll try your audio script to see if it works next time the problem happens.

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"I even found myself driving by convenience stores... that weren't on the way home."

PopeRigby

Member

Registered: 2019-10-19

Posts: 110

Re: Video playback through Firefox and system wide audio keeps breaking

Is this something that developed at some point, or is it a problem that was always there? If it's something that just started showing up at some point, can you remember the date? You could then hunt through the pacman.log file and see what was updated around that date. This command line here filters the log file to just the package changes:

grep -E '\] (ins|upg|rem)\w+ ' /var/log/pacman.log | less +G

I don't know how to fix this kind of thing, but there was a time where I had audio problems after a suspend/resume. Instead of rebooting to fix it, I found out I could restart the audio hardware with a script:

#!/bin/bash

[[ $UID = 0 ]] || exec sudo "$0"

LC_ALL=C lspci -D |
grep '^\S* Audio device:' |
while read -r pci_id rest; do
    echo 1 > "/sys/bus/pci/devices/$pci_id/remove"
done
sleep 1
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan

Yeah that works to fix it without having to restart. Now I'm wondering why it's happening in the first place.

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"I even found myself driving by convenience stores... that weren't on the way home."