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Old 23rd June 2018
new2BSDlol new2BSDlol is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 21
Default No sound problem on Youtube with OpenBSD 6.2/6.3 and Firefox (temporary solution)

I was running OpenBSD 6.2 on an AMD system with Firefox 52 and occasionally youtube videos would play with no sound. Often refreshing the page would bring the sound back, but in some cases no amount of refreshes seemed to work and I would reboot or use youtube-dl.

I hoped it would be fixed when I switched to an Intel system and OpenBSD 6.3 and Firefox 59... unfortunately the problem persisted. I found the problem seemed to be rarer if I let the page load for a bit instead of hitting the play button as soon as it appeared. So I had a look at the OpenBSD FAQ: Multimedia, Debugging audio problems section...
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq13.html#audioprob
...and was thinking about filing a bug report.

$ audioctl play.{bytes,errors}
...showed that sound was actually being streamed to the sound card when the no-sound bug occurred.
$ mixerctl
...didn't show any muted channels.

And then a few days ago while I was investigating audioctl and mixerctl and the bug I accidentally clicked the mute button (speaker icon) on youtube. Clicked it again to unmute and voila, sound's back. The many times that the error has occurred since then I have fixed it with that method. It is possible adjusting the sound volume level would fix the problem as well.

Edit: Just tested it on Dailymotion where the error occurred also and changing the volume fixed it.

Just posting this because I'm guessing that if it happened to me with two versions of OpenBSD and Firefox and two different systems then it may be fairly common, and it's fairly easy to work around until it's fixed permanently.

Last edited by new2BSDlol; 27th July 2018 at 11:43 AM.
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