# Firefox sound latency



## Dan1973 (Jun 14, 2013)

Hi all.

 I compiled from ports Firefox 21.0 with multimedia support through Gstreamer. It works OK video-wise, HTML 5 at http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html is beautifully rendered, YouTube HTML 5 works OK for supported videos but sound is another story:

For each video played there is a great issue with sound latency. For example, when you play a YouTube video and hit pause the video freezes instantly, but the sound continues to be played for about 30 sec_ond_s. Volume control latency is also horrible. The same happens for other videos, for example Quirksmode videos have noticeable sound latency, but shorter than YouTube. Same for other HTML5 enabled multimedia, such as those from Corsera.

I mention that Opera browser works OK with respect to this issue (no sound latency) but the lack of H264 support pretty much obsoletes it for modern web browsing. 

So my question is: are there any settings I can tweak in Firefox to eliminate this issue? Either at compile time, or at run-time?

Another problem are Vimeo videos, they do not play correctly (at all) with HTML 5. Is there any way to make Firefox lie to Vimeo and present itself differently to allow playing content from there through HTML5? 

Note that I do not want to install Linux emulation (really, what for??) to have Adobe Flash running, I am OK with HTML5 support in Firefox.

In other multimedia respects, my FreeBSD desktop runs irreproachable. All multimedia programs work out of the box, VDPAU works, sound is great with OSS, font rendering (after a lot of tweaking) is _outstanding_ in all programs I use. 

With thanks.


----------



## zspider (Jun 14, 2013)

I have the same problem, I just put up with it. Of course if someone has a solution I'd be glad to hear it.


----------



## trev (Jun 24, 2013)

Same problem with SeaMonkey. I learned to live with it as it beats having Flash issues.


----------



## jwele (Jun 24, 2013)

Same issue here as well. Definitely seems dependent on the libraries or something (I don't know exactly where the problem is). When I use _O_pera I personally do not have issues with sound latency.


----------



## laurentis (Jun 26, 2013)

I'm running Seamonkey 2.17.1 here. I had the same issues until I changed the audio option to ALSA. Mozilla's current audio backend is based on 'cubeb' which does not support OSS at the moment, hence the need for ALSA compatibility. OSS in Mozilla means to use an older audio backend (libsydneyaudio) which has just been dropped in Firefox 22.


----------



## jozze (Jun 27, 2013)

Exactly, as @laurentis suggests it's because anything that isn't ALSA doesn't work well with firefoxf. I think sound latency is fixed with the use of WEBRTC option, which can only be selected with ALSA.

I fixed my problem by switching to www/opera, which is very fast, consumes less RAM and retains support for Adblock Plus, which really is invaluable.


----------

