[pulseaudio-discuss] Flash Plugin 10 Install Borks Audio

[Colin Guthrie]

Richi Plana wrote:
> Thanks for the tips, Colin.
> 
> So I tried running pulseaudio -vvv from the command-line to see what was
> going on in the PA side. I initially started without libflashsupport.
> 
> Surfing over to a youtube page with video and audio, I saw the usual
> video and couldn't hear any audio. No activity on the PA front.

OK, so that would seem to suggest that the alsa client used by flash is 
not getting routed through to pulse. As I mentioned previously, you 
should make sure you have the correct alsa-lib + alsa-plugins for the 
32-bit pulse plugin support in alsa.

> I then "yum install"ed libflashsupport, which resulted in the following
> output from PA:
> 
> D: module-hal-detect.c: dbus: interface=org.freedesktop.Hal.Device,
> path=/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer, member=PropertyModified

> All normal, I figured.

Yeah this is just normal noise from hal and can be ignored... some more 
filtering should probably be done to hide this...

> (Side question, though: how does flash-plugin
> make use of libflashsupport when it's just a library that sits
> in /usr/lib64/? Is there some rpm post script that somehow links the
> library to flash-plugin?)

Hmmmmmm. This is suspicious. As Adobe do not ship a 64-bit flash, it 
makes absoluetely no sense to build a 64-bit libflashsupport. I can be 
done. but there is no way for it to work. You need the 32-bit version of 
libflashsupport here. I specifically tell the Mandriva buildsystem to 
disable 64-bit build of libflashsupport for this reason.

Flash itself knows to dlopen() a library called libflashsupport at init. 
As your system knows what your standard library path is, flash can rely 
on dlopen to find the libflashsupport library.



> After installation, I restarted mozilla and got:
> 
> I: client.c: Created 1 "EsounD client (UNIX socket client)"

Depends what client that was. Could be the esd client. Incidentally you 
will definately need to restart mozilla as the flash plugin initialises 
and keeps it's setup, so you need to restart to reinitiialise it.

> At least mozilla seems to have connected fine. Then I surf back to the
> youtube page, and again no audio and no activity on the PA log side.
> 
> I don't know what flash-plugin uses for audio so I'm not sure what's
> missing and why the two aren't connecting. Any more suggestions?

Well as previously stated there appear to be serveral problems here that 
stop the two working methods from working.

1. You've got the wholly redundant 64-bit version of libflashsupport 
which cannot be loaded or used by the 32-bit flash.

and

2. You apprear to not have the 32-bit alsa-lib/alsa-plugins installed 
which would allow native 32 bit alsa apps (i.e. flash sans 
libflashsupport) to work with pulse audio.


Fixing either of the above should result in working sound :)

(I'd recommend fixing both!)

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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