yet more sharks.

[kaberett]

Any suggestions on enabling support for mp3 playback in Firefox ESR under Debian Buster? I ask because, you see, it would be really nice to have Duolingo usable on desktop, but I appear to have exhausted my ability to google usefully. (Everything else is trending toward working! But I have installed all the possible relevant permutations of gstreamer1.0 plugins, and...)

Web console errors on attempting to play mp3 files:

HTTP "Content-Type" of "audio/mpeg" is not supported. Load of media resource https://d1vq87e9lcf771.cloudfront.net/linguatec_de_w/5f06f63b98551aa077592a7b612d1e26 failed. 1
Cannot play media. No decoders for requested formats: audio/mpeg

Comments

[wohali]

Try apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly then restart ff?

[vass]

*falls about laughing at the package names*

[kaberett]

THEY HAVE BEEN A BRIGHT SPOT IN THIS SWIM, YES.

[kaberett]

got'em, no joy :-(

[wohali]

hmmm. https://linuxtechie.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/enabling-html5-mp3-playback-in-firefox-30-and-above-3/ was my only hint on this, and I'm not running Buster, I tend to run stable or old-stable. Let me sniff around a bit more and I'll let you know?

[kaberett]

<3

[wohali]

Found it. You need to install gstreamer1.0-plugins-good .

Proof:

https://packages.debian.org/buster/gstreamer1.0-plugins-good

Note this includes the libmpg123-0, which is what plays back MPEG layer 1/2/3 audio.

The -bad and -ugly libraries help you play other stuff. Looks like in gstreamer-1.0, that library moved to -good, possibly because of the expiration of the MP3 patents...not 100% sure.

[kaberett]

Alas I have all of these installed and even after a reboot, no dice :-/

(and it's definitely Firefox being Firefox, because mp3s work Just Fine in Chrome...)

[kaberett]

(a thing that is really perplexing me about this is that I've got another machine, a desktop, with the same version of Debian and the same kernel version and the same version of Firefox ESR and the same set of ffmpeg and gstreamer packages installed and it is playing the audio through external speakers, but adding e.g. headphones unsurprisingly doesn't solve the laptop problem. I'm going to just... double-check browser extensions, though it seems Unlikely that's the culprit, and once that fails I'm gonna consider taking a wild stab in the dark and installing my old media player + dependencies, which has the minor issue that it's no longer being shipped with buster...)

[wohali]

What if you run alsamixer and unmute various channels?

[kaberett]

It's not clear to me why that would have any effect given that the issue appears to be lack of in-browser support for mp3 decoding in Firefox, as compared with e.g. Chrome, which copes just fine?

[silveradept]

A complete spit all here, but Firefox used to/still might keep a list of "helper programs" or external things it would call in when it was handling media stuff. The error that you're getting suggests that Firefox doesn't actually know how to handle the file or what console command or outside program to run. I've forgotten where that setting is located, but maybe that's the spot?

[kaberett]

oh, good shout, I'd got as far as the "what handles mp3s" on the laptop but not the desktop! will have a look :-)