Faststream and APTX-LL: audio crackling when watching youtube or netflix
This is about the new faststream bluetooth codec. I had already started to report this in the comments of the MR: !890 (comment 1038075)
But now that it's been merged, I thought it would make more sense to open an issue.
My device is exactly A90P, USB-C version, latest DFU (the one that makes it show as Aria 90T, as you can find on manufacturer's site).
Audio recording does not seem to be affected: I tried with audacity and recording seems fine. Also had a meeting using jitsi meet electron client and it worked wonders (both audio input and output).
My problem (when using faststream option) seems to be happening mostly on streaming sites like youtube or netflix, both on chrome and firefox. The videos I noticed were conan o'brien's videos when he is talking to someone (there are a lot, just search youtube and chose any official video), but I confirm it's also pretty noticeable on netflix too. Hope this helps to reproduce the issue.
On the other hand, if I download a video using youtube-dl and play it with something like smplayer, there are no issues. When using the browsers the crackling starts after a few seconds into the video. It's not constant, but it's pretty noticeable every few seconds at least. So it may have something to do on how both browsers send the audio to the pulseaudio backend vs on how the other apps I mentioned do (sample ratio perhaps?)
Or perhaps this has something to do with another already reported issue (there are a few people complaining in pipewire's issues section, related to youtube and alike platforms), but as I said I don't have problems when I select aptx, aptx-hd, sbc, sbc-xq and so on, or if I use my headset with an avantree DG-80 adapter (that presents itself to the machine as a regular USB sound card while handling all the bluetooth stuff by itself, including supporting faststream and has no problems like the one I'm reporting), so I'm pretty confident this issue is not related to any other.
Best regards
On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 8:29 AM P V (@pvir) gitlab@gitlab.freedesktop.org wrote:
P V commented on a discussion:
You can use e.g. GNOME sound recorder and play back with different profile. But input stream is likely different, since the problem is probably buffering on the device side.
That being said, I don't hear them here, but maybe I have a different model of the headset (Aria Pro A90P).