Audio streaming from a particular site seems to work, but no sound
Hi,
My configuration is Firefox 78.14.0esr (64-bit), running on Slax, a Linux live distro based on Debian 10.
The URL I'm having trouble with is https://oldtime.radio. I click on a channel on the main page and the audio appears to stream. The tab in Firefox shows the speaker icon in the corner, but I get no sound. I've tried launching Firefox from the command line in safe mode with a new (blank) profile with the same behavior. No error messages in Firefox or the console. YouTube plays okay, as do various news sites. When an audio file is "playing" on the old time radio site, a link appears to download the corresponding mp3 file. If I click that link, the mp3 file autoplays correctly. Just streaming doesn't seem to play. I tried the site in Chromium and it works correctly.
I'm not sure how to further troubleshoot. I suspect there might be something like a codec that Firefox isn't finding that is included with Chromium but I don't know how to identify or trace what the stream is from the site.
Thanks,
Pat
All Replies (3)
Is there a reason for that version of Firefox? Make sure you have the latest FFmpeg and libavcodec packages. see screenshot
Modified by jonzn4SUSE
I forgot your running a live version... How old is that live version because that is an old ESR version of Firefox, the current ESR is 91.
Thanks for the replies. Yeah, the distro is kind of old, from Oct. 2019. The maintainer doesn't release new versions very often. I'll probably have to live with the situation until a new version of Slax comes out. Even though it's a live distro, you can install software with apt and create "bundles" (akin to tar files) of the installed software. The bundles can be saved to permanent storage and merged back into the aufs (union filesystem) on the next boot if desired, to add the software back in without having to reinstall through apt.
But it seems to only work reliably when installing from the standard Debian repositories. I tried installing newer versions of Firefox (non-ESR) yesterday from the "unstable" Debian repo, which resulted in a perl error midway through the installation process. I also tried unpacking and running the latest version of FF from the download link (95.x I believe) and it seemed to cause the system to become unstable. I think in both cases, it was conflicts with the versions of the installed dependencies. So ffmpeg and libavcodec58 are both at version 7:4.1.6-1~deb10u1.
I might contact the author of the oldtime radio website, as I see the software the website uses is open source and on github, to see if he can point me in the direction of the difference between the format of the streaming version and the mp3 version since one works for me and one doesn't.
Again, thanks for your time.
Pat