status of higher bitrate playback

[Espen]

Dear everyone,

I am seeking some updates an believe some of you might know the details of the current status of high bitrate playback (say 24/96k) on Linux through web interfaces.

With the recent addition of avoiding resampling in PulseAudio playback software, say Rythmbox on Fedora 30 works just fine and passes through whatever is fed in (pacmd list-sinks).

However, using any web player fixes PuleAudio at 24/44.1k. Both Firefox and Chrome. The same in Nuvola, but that is to be expected, right? Nuvola basically works of an underlying web interface as far as I understand.

Taking Firefox as an example, that should now come with a FLAC codec, so playing of Qobuz at 24/96 should work (they are supplying standard FLAC supposedly (?)), but it does not. In fact it is stuck at 24/44.1k regardless of quality chosen. Same with Nuvola by the way. Popping through these things also results in the output being stuck at 24/44.1k and those are definitely FLAC files.

Any additional details on this topic would be great. In fact I was not able to find a lot of useful stuff online. Most things are related to playback on intrinsic software and that is working and not the problem here. At this point I am coming to a stop trying to figure out the origin of why this is and how one can potentially fix it.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Espen

[Espen]

Right after I submitted this I read from ArchWiki (of course) that Firefox uses ffmpeg. It thus seems that this is outputting 24/44.1k regardless. There is no problem running ffmpeg standalone to produce 24/96k output so I guess I just have to find a way to override this. An alias is a bit dirty, but might work. Do anyone know how ffmpeg sets it defaults and how one can control this?

[fenryxo]

Hello Espen,

> Nuvola basically works of an underlying web interface as far as I understand.

You're right that Nuvola works of an underlying web interface. Audio is produced by Chromium Embedded Framework and Nuvola itself doesn't interfere in any way.

> Any additional details on this topic would be great.

You could try asking Chromium/Firefox developers.

Best regards,

Jiri Janousek