[PLUG] flash plugin and sound

[Daniel Hedlund]

I have a simple script that I use to enable and disable the flash plugin 
for Firefox that I normally keep as "~/bin/flash".  Unfortunately the 
script isn't perfect and there are a few things I'd like to improve upon:
- if you have sound playing when the flash plugin is first used on a web 
page, you no longer have any sound support in flash until after you've 
completely restarted Firefox.
- when you disable the plugin, you have to restart Firefox for the 
changes to take effect.  Enabling flash while the web browser is open is 
okay and changes take effect immediately.

What I'd like to do is to find some way to unload or replace the flash 
plugin with an empty/shell plugin to cause it unload without restarting 
Firefox.  This is becoming a huge pain for me in that I am almost always 
listening to music using rhythmbox or mplayer while browsing the web. 
Fairly often I like to listen to streaming music (radio, GarageBand.com, 
CDBaby.com, etc) and would simply like to stop rhythmbox and hit 'play' 
within the flash plugin.  I have even reverted to such tactics as 
loading Firefox as another user using sudo so I don't have to restart my 
Firefox client with 20+ pages open.  I think the problem is mostly 
because flash doesn't use alsa and thus doesn't allow mixing?

Any ideas, solutions or success stories?  For anyone interested in 
enabling/disabling the flash plugin, my script is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

display_usage() {
     echo "USAGE: $0 [ --enable | --disable ]"
     echo
}

if [ ! $# -eq 1 ]; then
     display_usage && exit 1
fi

if [ $1 = "--enable" ]; then
     echo "enabling flash..."
     chmod 644 ~/.mozilla/plugins/flashplayer.xpt
     chmod 755 ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

elif [ $1 = "--disable" ]; then
     echo "disabling flash..."
     chmod 000 ~/.mozilla/plugins/{flashplayer.xpt,libflashplayer.so}

elif [ $1 = "--help" ]; then
     display_usage && exit 0

else
     display_usage && exit 1
fi


Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org