Bug 155269

Summary: Macromedia Flash has no sound in Firefox
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Holly Mennie <kalinda>
Component: FirefoxAssignee: E-mail List <bnc-team-mozilla>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None CC: tiwai
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: SUSE Linux 10.1   
Hardware: i386   
OS: SuSE Linux 10.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Holly Mennie 2006-03-04 03:37:59 UTC 
I feel sort of silly asking this here.. but I'm getting frustrated. This seems to be a common problem.. and people have figured it out for Ubunto and maybe even Debian but I've found nothing for Suse. I emailed Macromedia and got no response. So I guess maybe you guys can help...

My problem started out like this: flash movies would have no sound if I had any media player open. Closing Firefox and said media player, then re-opening Firefox and going to the flash would fix this problem. Then I went and downloaded an ALSA-oss rpm because a forum said that it would fix it. Except it just completely eliminated sound in flash altogether...

I don't know if Suse uses OSS or ALSA by default.. in any case getting rid of the ALSA-oss thing didn't fix it. I found a topic on the Mozilla Firefox forum that said that Firefox uses OSS by default and that you had to make it use ALSA if that's what you had. I don't know which one I have.. I suppose I should've read more about this before just installing things....

I've tried moving libflashplayer.os into the Firefox plugins folder, I also did "chmod 666 dsp" in the terminal, as per instructions on another forum.. but I think that was for Ubunto. In any case, I'm stuck.

Help is much appreciated :)
Comment 1 Wolfgang Rosenauer 2006-03-04 08:44:15 UTC 
Firefox uses libesd (which uses Alsa) but Flash is using /dev/dsp directly as it uses OSS compatible stuff I think.
We workaround this in SUSE Linux 10.1 by preloading libaoss when starting Firefox.
So you would have to modify the startscript:

please locate the line 
$MOZ_PROGRAM $@

and change it to 

/usr/bin/aoss $MOZ_PROGRAM $@

in /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/firefox.sh

That should hopefully fix the problem.
Comment 2 Holly Mennie 2006-03-04 14:44:42 UTC 
No, that didn't work :(

It is worth noting that, oddly, the script you mentioned was not located in /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ but rather in /usr/lib/firefox. So I changed the script and when that didn't work I copied it to the place you said it was supposed to be.

Also.. the script had some aoss stuff already in it: 

# AOSS
AOSS=$(which aoss)

# Force use of GTK+ 2.0 for Flash player to get better performance
# (no impact when using mozilla gtk1 build
#
export FLASH_GTK_LIBRARY=libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

# ignore composite extension
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

# Pango support
if [ -z "$MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO" -a -z "$MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO" ]; then
  case "${LC_ALL-${LC_CTYPE-${LANG-en_US}}}" in
    bn*|gu*|hi*|kn*|ml*|mr*|pa*|ta*|te*)  # list of languages which need pango
	;;
    *)
        MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 # disable by default
        ;;
  esac
fi

On top of this, the line you mentioned, $MOZ_PROGRAM $@, was there but it had $AOSS in front of it. I removed that and added the proper stuff.

This may have to do with my installation of that ALSA-oss RPM package.. or how I ran "aoss firefox" in the terminal last night, though it did nothing except open Firefox.

Thanks for the timely reply :)
Comment 3 Wolfgang Rosenauer 2006-03-04 19:48:10 UTC 
You didn't mention that you already use a non-official update version of firefox.
The package you have has all needed parts.
The interesting thing is that it still doesn't work. As I don't know much about sound/alsa I add someone who might have.
Comment 4 Takashi Iwai 2006-03-10 12:17:40 UTC 
If you invoke as "aoss firefox", LD_PRELOAD is kept so the binary itself should be started with the same hook.

Setting $ALSA_OSS_DEBUG=1 will give you some debug prints if the binary is really hooked with libaoss.  Please check through it, or add strace to check syscalls.
Comment 5 Matej Horvath 2007-02-16 14:22:46 UTC 
No reaction on this bug for a long time. Closing as CANTFIX.