[PLUG] flash plugin and sound

[Daniel Hedlund]

Daniel Hedlund wrote:
> - 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.

I've fixed my problem relating to sound in flash when sound is being 
used by another application.  The solution was to install the 'alsa-oss' 
library and then use the 'aoss' wrapper program around Firefox, i.e. 
'aoss firefox'.  This solution seems to work well for me and even allows 
Firefox to play sounds at the same time as another application.  This 
solution may also fix some other sound problems related to flash (sound 
lagging while playing videos), but I haven't tested this thoroughly yet.

A walkthrough for Debian and Ubuntu can be found at:
http://planet-geek.com/archives/003048.html

For Fedora/Redhat-based users, you'll need to manually download an 
alsa-oss RPM from a 3rd party website and then run the 'aoss ...' 
command above; it doesn't appear to be in any common 2nd/3rd party 
repositories used with Fedora though.  CCRMA seems to be the preferred 
download site by posters on other mailing lists.

Fedora Core 5:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetcore/5/i386/alsa-oss-1.0.11-1.rhfc5.ccrma.i386.rpm

Fedora Core 4:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetcore/4/i386/alsa-oss-1.0.9-1.rhfc4.ccrma.i386.rpm

Fedora Core 3:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/planetcore/3/i386/alsa-oss-1.0.9-0.1.rc1.rhfc3.ccrma.i386.rpm

...

I am not sure the steps required to get flash's sound working properly 
under other Linux distributions since I don't have them installed.

I still have not yet come up with a solution to dynamically unload flash 
from Firefox while it's still running, but I did talk with someone who 
gave a suggestion of modifying mime-types dynamically within Firefox to 
prevent new Flash applets from using the library.  I have not yet tested 
this idea and whether or not it can be triggered by a shell script.

Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org