Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Well, it was a good idea at the time

The MP3 idea is shelved for the moment mostly due to bugs in how 31ESR manages media streams (these bugs are also in the regular Firefox, so they're a Mozilla problem). While the MP3 decoder is mostly written and working except for arbitrary seeking which is still problematic and has been disabled for the moment, there are various glitches in streaming music services that make it not ready for 31 (especially on Amazon Music, which is what it was originally written for). These nuisances don't make it unplayable, but they do make it annoying, such as streams failing to time out and requiring full buffering, audio glitches with seeking when tracks switch, and some tracks that fail to play at all. Regular ESR 31.2.0 shows all these problems too, so it's not us, but I can't find a specific fix for these and the proper reworking was probably spread along multiple fixes around Fx33 or Fx34.

Because it mostly works but fails in subtle ways, I will leave it in 31.3 but disabled. To avoid a situation with plugins (this is why we can't have nice things) where people post instructions but don't link back to posts explaining limitations in support, you'll have to find the setting yourself. Seeking doesn't work (except for replaying from the beginning) and there are other bugs which I won't fix in the 31 timeframe, so don't even bother reporting them. No further work will be done on it until we get to 38, assuming we do. If you give these instructions out and you don't remind people of this, I will cut out your intestines with a rusty spoon.

The 34 port hopefully will be done by this weekend and then I need to figure out what to do with it.

2 comments:

  1. Well, it's two steps ahead and one step back, but in sum that still makes one step in the right direction. Looking forward to play with it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Did you ever notice the older people get the more crotchety they become?

    ReplyDelete

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