Arch Linux

alexanderQ\

Member

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 11

pulseaudio and firefox

Hey guys, recently I installed the pulse audio following the archwiki. So far everything is working perfect except that sometimes one action of firefox(not play flash, just normally open a new tab or something) could crash pulseaudio and the output sound becomes noise of current. But after i restart pulseaudio, it can work again with no problem.
This kind of thing has happened for several times and I noticed that firefox use oss as default audio output after searching on the Internet. Their suggestion is to simply edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc or ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc  and set the value of variable FIREFOX_DSP equals "padsp" to change the default audio output into pulseaudio. But i can not find either of the two files.
Any suggestions?

martin77

Member

Registered: 2010-03-14

Posts: 111

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

did you try just creating the file from scratch containing that setting you need?

an alternative could be to download the ALSA-OSS backend I saw in the repositories. This will add/improve support for old applications using OSS system with the new ALSA system.

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,362

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

I use firefox and pulseaudio with no problems. Why would you think that Firefox uses OSS by default? It uses alsa output here, and turns up on pavucontrol as "Alsa plug-in [firefox]"

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alexanderQ\

Member

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 11

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

did you try just creating the file from scratch containing that setting you need?

an alternative could be to download the ALSA-OSS backend I saw in the repositories. This will add/improve support for old applications using OSS system with the new ALSA system.

Yes, i did create a file named rc with FIREFOX_DSP="padsp" in. But there is no luck...  And I have already installed ALSA-OSS backend.  Thanks for your advice, anyway!

I use firefox and pulseaudio with no problems. Why would you think that Firefox uses OSS by default? It uses alsa output here, and turns up on pavucontrol as "Alsa plug-in [firefox]"

Yes ngoonee, you are right. Firefox do use alsa as output when I recheck this  using pavucontrol. The place I got that the default output is oss is an ubuntu howtohttp://developer.novell.com/wiki/index. … ox.2FFlash. It's at the bottom of the page. May be it is only for ubuntu..

So does alsa pulg-in have some incompatibilities with pulse audio?  Or maybe it is caused by some extension of firefox?

so far, i just disabled most of my firefox extensions and see whether this problem will be reproduced.

Last edited by alexanderQ\ (2010-03-29 08:30:03)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,362

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

Revert all your changes, Ubuntu is quite behind in things normally so advise there should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Then, kill your pulseaudio session and start a new one in a terminal with pulseaudio -vvvvv. Try and reproduce the problem, then paste the error messages here. In the event that you can't capture the error messages you may need to pipe them into a file.

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

alexanderQ\

Member

Registered: 2009-10-30

Posts: 11

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

Today, this probles happened again. Here is log output by pulseaudio

D: alsa-sink.c: Requested volume: 0:  38% 1:  38%
D: alsa-sink.c: Got hardware volume: 0:  38% 1:  38%
D: alsa-sink.c: Calculated software volume: 0:  99% 1:  99% (accurate-enough=yes)
D: protocol-native.c: Requesting rewind due to end of underrun.
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested to rewind 17664 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: Limited to 17664 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: before: 4416
D: alsa-sink.c: after: 4416
D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 17664 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 17664 bytes on render memblockq.
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 17664 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
D: protocol-native.c: Underrun on 'ALSA Playback', 0 bytes in queue.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to corking
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested volume: 0:  38% 1:  38%
D: alsa-sink.c: Got hardware volume: 0:  38% 1:  38%
D: alsa-sink.c: Calculated software volume: 0:  99% 1:  99% (accurate-enough=yes)
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested to rewind 17664 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: Limited to 17664 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: before: 4416
D: alsa-sink.c: after: 4408
D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 17632 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 17632 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
I: sink-input.c: Freeing input 2 "ALSA Playback"
I: client.c: Freed 2 "ALSA plug-in [firefox]"
I: protocol-native.c: Connection died.
D: protocol-native.c: Underrun on 'XMMS2', 0 bytes in queue.

In addition, before it happened, I also noticed this in the log of pulseaudio

D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 17632 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 17632 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
        E: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!
E: alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
E: alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.
I: client.c: Created 1 "EsounD client (UNIX socket client)"
D: protocol-esound.c: read(): EOF
I: client.c: Freed 1 "EsounD client (UNIX socket client)"

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

Remove all oss related stuff, blacklist all oss related modules and padsp stuff, create /etc/asound.conf with:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

Install alsa-plugins.

Firefox should work fine with pulse, at least here it does work just fine like that.

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R00KIE
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xiwenc

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2010-02-28

Posts: 6

Website

Re: pulseaudio and firefox

I've been experiencing similar pulseaudio problems, more specifically with mplayer getting stuck after every few seconds of playback. Normal resume in mplayer doesn't work either. Other times apps using sound becomes unresponsive until pulseaudio is killed. All this happens at random times but frequent enough to be irritating.

Please note that this utterly cumbersome behavior has appeared 3-4 weeks ago. Downgrading pulseaudio to 0.9.21-6 or earlier doesn't seem to help much.

Here are some debug data while using mplayer

mplayer gets stuck after I did a skip-forward

: alsa-sink.c: hwbuf_unused=60024
D: alsa-sink.c: setting avail_min=15503
D: alsa-sink.c: Requesting rewind due to latency change.
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested to rewind 65536 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: Limited to 61944 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: before: 15486
D: alsa-sink.c: after: 15486
D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 61944 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 61944 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
D: protocol-native.c: Requesting rewind due to end of underrun.
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested to rewind 65536 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: Limited to 1856 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: before: 464
D: alsa-sink.c: after: 464
D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 1856 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 1856 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
D: protocol-native.c: Underrun on 'ALSA Playback', 0 bytes in queue.
D: alsa-sink.c: Wakeup from ALSA!
D: alsa-sink.c: Wakeup from ALSA!

And here it won't resume playback after a pause.

D: alsa-sink.c: Cutting sleep time for the initial iterations by half.
D: alsa-sink.c: Cutting sleep time for the initial iterations by half.
D: alsa-sink.c: Cutting sleep time for the initial iterations by half.
D: alsa-sink.c: Cutting sleep time for the initial iterations by half.
D: alsa-sink.c: Cutting sleep time for the initial iterations by half.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to corking
D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo becomes idle, timeout in 5 seconds.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to uncorking
D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo becomes busy.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to corking
D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo becomes idle, timeout in 5 seconds.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to uncorking
D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo becomes busy.
D: sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due to corking
D: module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo becomes idle, timeout in 5 seconds.

Anyone got clues what's going on? Or pointers on how I should further debug this?

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