Sound disappeared [possibly caused by Hangouts]

[Rich Oliver]

I installed Kubuntu 16.04 on my laptop: Haswell using the Intel graphics. Everything seemed fine, I had sound from videos and the BBC web site and then I was messing around in Hangouts trying to make a video call and I installed the plugins and allowed the hardware access as required. Now I'm not getting any sound from films or on utube or anything else. I've tried rebooting and it doesn't help. When I boot into my Kubuntu 14.04 install the sound is fine, so its not a hardware problem.

Any thoughts appreciated Rich.

[Snowhog]

Validate that it is/was the plugins; uninstall/remove them and reboot.

[Rich Oliver]

Validate that it is/was the plugins; uninstall/remove them and reboot.

Weirder and weirder. I had set the Google Talk plugin and the Google Talk plugin video renderer to never activate, but I couldn't find a way to completely remove them. I use the same Firefox profile across my Linux distros, when i checked in Kubuntu 14.04 there was no sign of them. When I rebooted into 16.04 my sound had returned. Harah! When I checked in plugins, the two plugins are greyed out as disabled.

What do people recommend as easiest in Kubuntu 16.04: Hangouts or Skype to make video calls? Do Hangouts work better in Chrome or Chromium?