Bug#585149: iceweasel: firefox accesses ALSA via crufty old libsydney

[Dave Witbrodt]

Package: iceweasel
Version: 10.0.1-1
Followup-For: Bug #585149


I found some time to take out of few items on my checklist.  First, I
found that two different user accounts on my desktop machine behaved
differently depending on the website.  This gave me some hope that old
cruft in my configuration might be breaking things for me.

So, I moved .mozilla out of the way and ran 'iceweasel' to create a
new configuration directory.  Now I find that I can sometimes play
WebM video with sound.  For example, this test site

  http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody/test.html

defaults to this media file

  http://clips.vorwaerts-gmbh.de/VfE.webm

for me, and it plays with sound correctly.


Unfortunately, bringing up the DebConf video

  http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2011/debconf11/high/836_Packaging_for_beginners.ogv

in a tab still plays video with no sound.  The Tools->Page Info->Media
dialog lists the Type as "Video", and there is no Associated Text
field shown.

This is slightly different than the camendesign.com WebM video which
works for me, which shows Type as "video/webm".  The video at
linux.com (mentioned in msg #46 above) still does not play:  though it
is a WebM video, it's Type comes up as "Video".  If the linux.com
pages were written to mark the video as "video/webm", I wonder if they
would play on my system?

So now I'm in a bind; all sound works on my system -- local software
(incl. games and media players), websites using Flash, and even some
sites hosting WebM video -- so it seems impossible that the Firefox/
Iceweasel code that initializes ALSA is broken.  (I took a quick look
at the source code, and I see that upstream has included an very old
source copy of libsydneyaudio to provide ALSA support on Linux, so it
is still possible that there is breakage there.)

What a bummer.  I'm going to try some packages that spawn external
media players for video files, too see if that can be used as a
workaround.


DW