[pulseaudio-discuss] [with workaround] Fluttered sound with Firefox or Chome when using PA through the network

[Michael DePaulo]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Tanu Kaskinen
<tanu.kaskinen at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> We have a patch[1] in bugzilla that is supposed to fix some problems
> with Flash when used with a tunnel sink. Does that patch fix your
> problem? If it does, can you reproduce the problem with anything else
> than with Flash content? One reason why the patch hasn't been applied
> yet is that Flash is closed source, which prevents us from understanding
> the issue thoroughly. If there was an open source program that could be
> used for reproducing the problem, that might help (although I don't
> personally promise to spend any time investigating the problem).
>
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66962
>
> --
> Tanu
>
> _______________________________________________
> pulseaudio-discuss mailing list
> pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss

This bug is affecting the X2Go Client for Windows.
(X2Go bug 363. Our "fix" is to bundle X2Go Client win32 with the
unaffected pulseaudio win32 0.9.6 in addition to the affected
pulseaudio win32 1.1.)

It appears to only affect PulseAudio when it is running on Windows. In
X2Go terminology, the PulseAudio server runs on the X2Go Client. We
always use a "Direct Connection" as listed here with X2Go:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Network/#index1h2

Anyway, I did some testing of this patch.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmL_OrCln9ShdHNVb2cyX2w2MUlJdTdOMnhNWW9uV2c&usp=sharing

In summary: The patch fixes the bug when firefox + flash_plugin is
running on Ubuntu 12.04. Firefox's HTML5 audio works fine with or
without the patch on Ubuntu 12.04. However, when the apps are running
on Fedora 20, applying this patch to the win32 pulseaudio causes audio
to stop working altogether!

Note that I have not applied either this win32 patch:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69710
nor this set of win32 patches:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69712
I am thinking of applying both of them on the win32 client and then
retesting Fedora 20.

Note that with X2Go, the windows client is using a config file like
this (the port numbers are randomly generated):
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp port=4713
load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp port=4714
load-module module-waveout

And the linux server is using a PULSE_CLIENTCONFIG file like this:
default-server=localhost:30002
cookie-file=.x2go/C-mike-50-1390783444_stDMATE_dp32/.pulse-cookie

Note that we are using SSH port forwarding by default. However, when I
disabled X2Go's SSH port forwarding for pulseaudio in the past, it did
not fix this flash audio bug.

-Mike DePaulo
win32 Package Maintainer for the X2Go Project