Recently audio stopped working in my flash video, when browsing in Chrome or Firefox, video is ok, but no audio. I don’t know when did it stop to work. My system is SUSE 11.3 with all software up-to-date. How can I fix it?
Hi,
KDE or GNOME? Pulse Audio or not?
I have KDE , but use openbox with kmix. pulse-audio 0.9.21.
Did you check in kmix that all the channels are not muted? Check also pavucontrol (pulse audio volume control) in the output tab that nothing is muted there.
thanks for this advice, but no, my audio plays ok except flash videos in browser, since the channel is one I think, then it cannot be kmix issue.
well pavucontrol says “connection failed”, “connection refused”, can anybody enlighten me about pulse-audio, or how Linux audio works, I know there’s ALSA system for managing audio in linux, aaaand what is pulse-audio? does it have alternatives or so, maybe some links on the topic, cause I really need some info.
This means that you are not using Pulse Audio.
This is weird… In system config of kde->multimedia, what are the audio engine installed?
pulse audio sound server, well, I tried to install alsa-pulse, that demanded me to uninstall my native alsa plugins that had conflicts with it, so I did, then pavucontrol started working, but my audio playback was laggish and distorted in some songs, so I uninstalled alsa-pulse and pavucontrol, but still nothing changed, no audio in flash, and what to do I don’t know.
I’ve already reainstalled SUSE due to some troubles with flash on previous installation, nobody helped out, but I’m not going to do it again. It seems to me that this flash-player is a **** buggy thing, and depends on lots of stuff, updates, audio configs and so, as I’m not specialist I cant figure out myself, I don’t even have a clue, so the only way to solve some serious trouble turns out to be clean install(as a windows user always does><), but hell, why do I need Linux then?
Have you installed a 32 bits or 64 bits system?
In that context, I would assume that the problem comes from Flash, but I am not sure either. All your audio works fine with other programs, so I guess Flash is the culprit.
actually, that is NOT the case. The PCM volume control will change dynamically when a new multimedia application runs. Hence you need to follow the advice given to you and check the PCM volume control in your mixer.
Typically, for KDE users, when flash does not work it is because:
- user ignored the PCM volume control thinking it does not change or thinking it does not matter. It does matter.
- user has multiple sound devices, and the top priority device in the KMenu > Configure desktop > multimedia does not match the top priority device (sound card 0) in YaST > Hardware > Sound
*]user has a sound engine selected in KMenu > Clonfigure Desktop > multimedia that is NOT properly configured to play flash audio
Hi oldcpu,
Really interesting. I keep this one under my sleeve. 
[/li]Wich one should be properly configured in this case? GStreamer? Phonon? Xine?
I think I bumped into old linux “wonderful” feature of not able to run two audio applications simultaneously, even if one doesn’t play and just sits in memory, (I hate it so much it hurts!), thank you for advices, I will stick to them, could you please tip me about pulse and alsa, or maybe a link that will clear my lack of info about what sound drivers does linux actually use, and what alternatives are there.
To brush up on basic concepts with openSUSE sound, take a read here: SDB:Sound concepts - openSUSE
The alsa sound driver is installed by default, and should be automatically configured upon boot.
Typically KDE uses either gstreamer or xine as the desktop backend (where firefox uses the desktop backend sound setup). Typically openSUSE KDE users replace the crippled Novell/SuSE-GmbH packaged libxine1 and xine-ui (which provides xine) with the Packman packaged libxine1 and xine-ui. Once installed, ‘xine’ can be run to configure xine (one needs to select the silly sounding ‘master-of-the-known-universe’ permissions setting in xine to tune as required). *.
On some hardware, with the appropriate application and xine backend settings, one can play sound from multiple applications at the time using the ALSA API (I know I can on my PCs). On some PCs that does not work.
Pulse audio purportedly provides the capability for multiple applications to play audio at the same time. I do not know how to set that up.*
oh, thanks for tips, I will try it.
Hello Letian,
I’m not sure my problem was the same as yours: no audio from flash content if any other application played audio. I have written about it at flash-and-pulseaudio-in-opensuse-11-3
I’m confused about you saying I tried to install alsa-pulse, that demanded me to uninstall my native alsa plugins:
By alsa-pulse, do you mean alsa-plugins-pulse ? Though alsa-plugins-pulse didn’t ask me to uninstall my native alsa packages - only to be expected, since pulseaudio does itself depend on alsa as the final audio sink.
I solved this problem. Go to yast or terminal and download alsamixer, then go to terminal and write alsamixer and raise the sound bars. You can also use gstreamer.