Bug#585149: iceweasel: The OGV video in message #5 works for me

[Dave Witbrodt]

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


In message #5 of this bug, Jad Zoghaib directs our attention to this
video (which will not play with audio in the case of that PPC system):

  http://videos.mozilla.org/firefox/3.5/meet/meet.ogv

On my system, that plays audio (and video) just fine.  And yet, on my
system, none of the OGV videos from DebConf 11 will play sound (only
video):

  http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2011/debconf11/high

Since some WebM and OGV files will play (with sound) in the Iceweasel
browser, I can rule out some possible causes I mentioned in
message #71:

0)  It's not specifically related to architecture (amd64, in my case).

1)  It's not caused by cruft in my .mozilla config directory -- I blew
that away today, but the problem with no sound in some WebM and OGV
videos (while sound plays fine in others) remained.

2)  I use a custom kernel and custom X stack, so I thought this might
be breaking things.  But sound works in general -- including 5.1
surround, simultaneous playback of as many sound sources as I like via
ALSA dmix, Flash videos in Iceweasel, and other files with sound in
Iceweasel -- so it cannot be my custom packages causing this problem.
(Besides, other users started this bug report, and they are not using
custom built packages AFAICS.)

3)  I have a custom, system-wide /etc/asound.conf file, and because of
problems I had with previous software I guessed that either this (or
initialization of sound in Iceweasel) would be the problem.  I was
wrong:  if any of the breakage was caused by this, sound would never
have worked with any of the videos... but I have found many that _do_
work.

4)  This cannot be blamed on debian-multimedia.org, since sound will
play correctly with some videos.  (I've had conflicts resulting from
mixing Sid and d-m.o before, and that usually results in total
breakage.)

I spent some time on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and could not find recent
bugs which involve video playback without audio.  My impression is
that Linux gets secondary attention in this area, likely because of
the history of confusion in Linux sound support; however, this seems
less like a problem with sound so much as some sort of confusion in
the browser about whether it can support playback of the problem
videos (or, at least the audio part of those videos).

Not sure how to proceed at this point.


DW