What can I do to restore audio in Flash after using Rythmbox?

October 3, 2006 1:45 PM

Linux audio: I don't get any audio in flash videos (i.e. Youtube) after listening to FLAC's and MP3's in Rythmbox (even after I close the program) until I reboot. Am I supposed to "free" the audio codecs after using them in one software? Linux Ubuntu 6.06, Mozilla Firefox, codecs installed by Automatix. Yes, am a newbie.
posted by jchgf to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I have a similar problem using Banshee with Ubuntu 6.06, although I never have to reboot. I just close Banshee, close Firefox and restart it again and the sound works.
posted by puffin at 2:06 PM on October 3, 2006

Supposedly, this works for ubuntu. For me, on gentoo, I had to edit /usr/bin/firefox and changed this line:

exec /usr/libexec/mozilla-launcher "$@"

to this:

exec aoss /usr/libexec/mozilla-launcher "$@"

If you're using ALSA, which ubuntu uses, stuff that opens /dev/dsp which is the old oss style sound device, needs exclusive access or it will fail. aoss is just a wrapper to fix that. Even if that doesn't make sense, just try one of the two fixes above and it should work without trouble from now on.
posted by mragreeable at 2:43 PM on October 3, 2006 [2 favorites]

What mragreeable said. Run mozilla through aoss, and it'll route the audio through ALSA (the proper way to do audio in Linux these days). Even though you're using ALSA, the sound and video will still be out of synch, because the Flash plugin is using the OSS (old sound API) under the hood.

A new flash plugin is supposedly on the horizon (early next year) that will use ALSA natively and all these shitty sound problems will go away.
posted by knave at 3:42 PM on October 3, 2006

I should note that for me, running Firefox through aoss has led to stability problems. Firefox occasionally locks up for me, now. I believe it's related to the GMail Manager extension I use, so it may or may not be a problem for you.
posted by knave at 3:43 PM on October 3, 2006

I was having the same problem, but it seems like mragreeable's link fixed it.
posted by nakedsushi at 3:47 PM on October 3, 2006

mragreeable's solution fixed xmms/firefox audio conflicts on my Gentoo system too. This is a surprising place to find a Gentoo fix.

In the future I'd suggest turning to http://ubuntuforums.org/ as the first place to look for solutions to Ubuntu Linux related problems or nuisances. Though today, I'm glad you did post to Ask Mefi. Thanks mragreeable!
posted by Loudmax at 4:01 PM on October 3, 2006

This fixed it for me, lickity split. Of course, I have the 1/4 second delay that everyone else gets too.
posted by furtive at 5:06 PM on October 3, 2006