Pale Moon forum

When I moved to Pale Moon, I found no sound on youtube (or anywhere else).

Trying to debug that from the forum led me to the test pages https://www.youtube.com/html5 and http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html, which both told me H.264 wasn't working. I checked that ffmpeg -codecs had h.264, and that downloaded files played fine in mplayer using H.264.

Eventually, my searching came across
https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/tree/master/dom/media/platforms/ffmpeg
which says the minimum version for libavcodec.so is 54.35.1. So I found and installed a newer version to go with my two older versions. (I understand from using other A/V programs that ffmpeg's innards change frequently.)

This activated H.264 in the test pages, but I still had no sound, although digging into the second test page I found that worked fine.

Eventually, I found an old thread https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=9661&p=65944
and did the same syntax transformation to my ALSA config /etc/asound.conf, which had been working fine for everything else. Now it appears that everything else *and* Pale Moon is happy.

That begs the question of what ye olde version of Linux didn't have libavcodec54...stock Debian Wheezy has only libavcodec53, but that can be upgraded to libavcodec55 from wheezy-backports. Seems like I should add a minimum version to the ffmpeg/libav-tools dependency in my packages, then.

One option that'll allow slightly older versions to work in Pale Moon for linux is to go to about:buildconfig and set the option media.libavcodec.allow-obsolete to true. It won't work for really ancient libraries but it will work with slightly older versions than the default value of true. Is trava90 monitoring this thread? Can he give us the exact version numbers this works for?

Pale Moon supports libavcodec versions from 53 to 57 (which is the most recent stable release if I'm not mistaken), while anything below version 54.35.1 is blocked by default (unless the allow-obsolete pref is flipped).