# No sound playing HTML5 videos in Firefox



## vatson (Nov 13, 2013)

I'm having this problem now with firefox-esr-24.1.0,1, but actually it was the same with Firefox ESR 17. I can watch HTML5 videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo, but there is no sound.

I have Firefox built with the GSTREAMER and ALSA options. Checking http://html5test.com shows in the "Audio" section that all audio formats (PCM, AAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, WebM) are supported. 

GStreamer can play MP3 and AAC files from the command line:


```
gst-launch playbin uri=file:///path/to/file
```

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot this further?

Regarding sound in HTML5 video, which of the Firefox port options is actually significant, GSTREAMER or ALSA? It seems logical that Firefox directs all multimedia, including sound, to the underlying GStreamer which then uses ALSA, PulseAudio or whatever else to actually play the sound. So why the extra choice between ALSA or PULSEAUDIO when building Firefox?


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## Juanitou (Nov 13, 2013)

It's a known problem, just update www/firefox and it should be solved.


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## vatson (Dec 3, 2013)

Yes, that was it. After updating the www/firefox-esr port to 24.1.0_1,1, Firefox immediately crashed whenever I attempted to access a page containing any HTML5 video. I rebuilt audio/alsa-plugins as explained in UPDATING/20121010, and now HTML5 videos are playing just fine with sound.


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## vatson (Dec 19, 2013)

I updated to firefox-esr-24.2.0,1 and the sound is gone again.


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