[pulseaudio-discuss] 64-bit Flash 10 and PulseAudio

[Tanu Kaskinen]

Hello,

This message contains, after some redundant blather, a hack to make
64-bit Flash (my version is 10.0 r22) use PulseAudio for sound output. I
haven't heard of this hack before, so I decided to share it.

A little while ago I tried to install 64-bit Flash 10. I couldn't make
it play through PA, which was odd since I had heard Flash 10 should work
fine with PA. I figured that maybe only the 32-bit version works well.
Installing the 32-bit version seemed very complicated, because the
needed Debian packages for a 32-bit execution environment were
uninstallable, so I didn't manage to do that. Luckily I found a program
that could rip the content I wanted. For Finnish readers' information:
the content is from YLE Areena; if you're interested in the ripping
program, google for "rtmpdump-yle".

Yesterday that program stopped working. The content I so badly want is
audio-only, so I should be able to record it with PA while playing it in
a web browser, if I only could make Flash use PA. I saw people claiming
around the net that the 64-bit version worked fine too, but as I tried
again today, it didn't work any better than before. I wonder what could
be different in my machine compared to those others.

Anyway, I figured that maybe Iceweasel would print some interesting
error messages when run from a terminal window. That it did. I got a
flood of the following error from libasound:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1008:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

So Flash doesn't seem to use the hardware directly after all! Instead,
it seems to be hardcoded to use dmix. (Hey Adobe, WTF is so hard in
using the default device??) I added this to ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!dmix {
    type pulse
}

And it worked!

-- 
Tanu Kaskinen