Amazon music unlimited: low audio quality on Firefox for Fedora

Hi,
I’m switching from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox but I have a problem with Firefox for Fedora (85). Amazon Music Unlimited audio streaming quality is lower compared to the same service played in Google Chrome. Why? My system has ffmpeg and ffmpeg-libs 16-fc33 from rpmfusion-free. Also Firefox for Fedora has Widewine enabled (4.10.1582.2).

I also downloades and tested Firefox Nightly appimage with Widewine enabled (4.10.1582.2): audio quality is very good, the same as Google Chrome.

I think it’s a Firefox for Fedora issue. How can I solve it? Thanks

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My only guess would be you are missing some weird audio dependency. Try sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin (if you have both rpmfusions) and see if that fixes it. You could also try the Firefox build from Flathub.

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Hi, unfortunately I have all multimedia packages installed.

Firefox from Flathub also has low quality audio with Amazon Music Unlimited. That’s very stange! I also tried Firefox 86 beta 3 appimage form https://github.com/srevinsaju/Firefox-Appimage: audio quality is as good as Google Chrome and Firefox nightly.

That’s so strange!

Maybe something was introduced in Firefox 86?

flatpak remote-add flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta firefox

See if this works. I may skim through the 86 patch notes quickly to see if there is anything noteworthy.

Edit:

Nothing noteworthy :frowning_face:

I did further testing in my system and Virtualbox. Here is a brief summary:

System (Fedora 33 Kde spin):

  1. Firefox 85 for Fedora (official Fedora repo): low quality
  2. Firefox 85 (Flathub): low quality
  3. Firefox 86b3 (Flathub): low quality
  4. Firefox 85 Appimage (GitHub - srevinsaju/Firefox-Appimage: Mozilla Firefox Stable AppImages by Continuous Integration): high quality
  5. Firefox 86b3 Appimage (same github repo): high quality
  6. Firefox 87 nightly Appimage (same github repo): high quality

Virtualbox (I only tested Firefox 85 in official repo):

  1. Fedora 33 Gnome (Wayland): low quality
  2. Manjaro Kde Plasma: high quality
  3. Solus Plasma: high quality

I don’t know if some is wrong with Fedora or not. Maybe Firefox appimage is built using different parameters that offer more compatibility…

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I would definitely report this to the Fedora Firefox maintainers: Overview - rpms/firefox - src.fedoraproject.org

Also, give the Flathub beta version a try. If that version seems to fail as well, it may be worth reporting directly to Mozilla.

Adding one more data point:

initially:
Firefox 95.0.2 (Fedora rpm): bad audio
Firefox 95.0.2 (Firefox flatpak): good audio

After installation of rpmfusion (as per official documentation including multimedia, e.g. ffmpeg-libs) → good audio also with the Fedora rpm version of Firefox.

Not sure it’s relate or not, but may be you could check if it already activated or not.

Click to expand: DRM Firefox

Click to expand: OpenH264 always active