How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

[mikeycal]

Hey everyone,

I discovered something about a week ago while reading through the ubuntu documentation. I discovered that there is a fix for the Macromedia flash audio problem... Sometimes Flash audio just wont play at all. Sometimes Flash audio will be WAY out of sync. Well it turns out that if you

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

followed by

sudo nano /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

and add the following line

FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

flash audio will be fixed.

As soon as I did this my flash audio has worked flawlessly..

Just thought I would share.

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

thank you muchly!!!

i was wondering if there was a fix for that.....

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

no luck.....

[mikeycal]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

no luck.....

Are you not getting audio at all?

or is audio just still out of sync?

I think that the main problem with Macromedia Flash on Ubuntu is that Flash is OSS centric while most modern Distros have phased out OSS in favor of the ALSA drivers. Basically all "alsa-oss" does is emulate OSS sound drivers in a ALSA environment.

I have noticed that at times there will still be a "slight" sync problem but flash Audio and video sync is Way better than it was and I never have flash audio crash on me anymore -- which was my main complaint.

by the way, make sure you actually edited the /etc/firefox/firefoxrc file instead of accidentally making a new file.

My /etc/firefox/firefoxrc looks like this:

#--------------------------------------------------
# which /dev/dsp wrapper to use
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"
# Note that "auto" and "esd" involve the use of esddsp, which
# is known to be buggy and to make Firefox unstable.
# See https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/29760.
#---------------------------------------------------

Also, as far as I know, this only fixes Flash for Firefox -- I don't know of a fix for Konqueror.

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

i think i had a different problem than you....
i thought this would solve it but it didnt.....
the problem i had was that if i use Amarok and decide to watch a video on youtube, i would have to pause Amarok and restart Firefox in order to have sound on the video.....

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

this "fix" actually started making my firefox freeze.....
everytime a video is sound is used on a webpage, it seems to freeze when i leave that page.....

[mikeycal]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

hmm...

So far I have done this on 3 different computers and it appears to have fixed them all.

Maybe this fix works better with some soundcards than others.

It might be that the soundcard needs good OSS driver support to work.

I can't wait till they swich to ALSA drivers in Flash 9 -- it's annoying that we even need a fix.

[jdunn]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Well, I tried this fix and it worked for sound on Flash but it totally screwed up my ALSA settings for KDE and I couldn't fix it. I had to reinstall Kubuntu Dapper from scratch.

Hey everyone,

I discovered something about a week ago while reading through the ubuntu documentation. I discovered that there is a fix for the Macromedia flash audio problem... Sometimes Flash audio just wont play at all. Sometimes Flash audio will be WAY out of sync. Well it turns out that if you

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

followed by

sudo nano /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

and add the following line

FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

flash audio will be fixed.

As soon as I did this my flash audio has worked flawlessly..

Just thought I would share.

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

it didnt mess up anything else for me.....
i set it on auto and now, it seems to work great.....
havent had any problems so far.....

[mikeycal]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Sorry to hear that you had to reinstall.

As far as I know, alsa-oss shouldn't enable itself systemwide -- this is why you have to enable it in the /etc/firefox/firefoxrc file.

You should also be able to return to the default settings simply by setting

FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" back to FIREFOX_DSP="none"

Well, I tried this fix and it worked for sound on Flash but it totally screwed up my ALSA settings for KDE and I couldn't fix it. I had to reinstall Kubuntu Dapper from scratch.

[The Liquidator]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Worked for me! Unfortunately the nano command provided me with no immediately apparent way to save the changes to the firefoxrc file. However, navigating to it in konqueror, right clicking and selecting actions/edit as root enabed me to do so. Flash now has sound with no apparent issues (yet) although some of the stuff on youtube may cause me to regret it

Thanks

Ian

[Teppic]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

If you are worried that this may cause you problems then run

 aoss firefox

from a terminal, if it works *properly* go ahead and modify the rc file.

[mitch6p]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Hey everyone,

I discovered something about a week ago while reading through the ubuntu documentation. I discovered that there is a fix for the Macromedia flash audio problem... Sometimes Flash audio just wont play at all. Sometimes Flash audio will be WAY out of sync. Well it turns out that if you

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

followed by

sudo nano /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

and add the following line

FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

flash audio will be fixed.

As soon as I did this my flash audio has worked flawlessly..

Just thought I would share.

Hey.. I wish I knew what all of that meant and how to do it because... I have this problem and it's really annoying me and I need help figureing it out. If you could tell me step by step that would be amazing. And it would help so much i'd be able to watch movies =]. Thank's a bunch :P.

[someguyouknow]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Hey.. I wish I knew what all of that meant and how to do it because... I have this problem and it's really annoying me and I need help figureing it out. If you could tell me step by step that would be amazing. And it would help so much i'd be able to watch movies =]. Thank's a bunch :P.

The easiest way i found was to edit the entry in kmenu to aoss firefox.
just right click on firefox in the menu. choose edit item. in command add aoss in front of firefox.

[jdunn]

Re: How to: Fix Flash Audio playback problems

Or...to eliminate all these problems with audio/audio sync, you can download and install Flash version 9.0 beta which just came out a few days ago. It works very well and the ALSA-OSS wrapper is no longer required.

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2...a_is_live.html