Amazon music unlimited: low audio quality on Firefox for Fedora

sbaragnaus · January 29, 2021, 6:11pm

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

nickavem · January 29, 2021, 7:13pm

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.

sbaragnaus · January 29, 2021, 8:43pm

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.

nickavem · January 29, 2021, 8:49pm

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

sbaragnaus · January 30, 2021, 5:27pm

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

System (Fedora 33 Kde spin):

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

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

Fedora 33 Gnome (Wayland): low quality
Manjaro Kde Plasma: high quality
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…

nickavem · January 30, 2021, 5:59pm

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.

rkraneis · January 5, 2022, 3:36pm

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.

oprizal · January 6, 2022, 11:35am

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