Bugzilla – Bug 155269
Macromedia Flash has no sound in Firefox
Last modified: 2007-02-16 14:22:46 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 :)
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 $@ in /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/firefox.sh That should hopefully fix the problem.
No, that didn't work :( It is worth noting that, oddly, the script you mentioned was not located in /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ but rather in /usr/lib/firefox. So I changed the script and when that didn't work I copied it to the place you said it was supposed to be. Also.. the script had some aoss stuff already in it: # AOSS AOSS=$(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 :)
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.
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.
No reaction on this bug for a long time. Closing as CANTFIX.