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tarpman

Member

From: Victoria, BC, Canada

Registered: 2010-02-11

Posts: 2

Chromium takes over system volume control

Hi forum,

I'm using GNOME, ALSA (no PulseAudio or ESD), and Chromium on an i686 install.  On my laptop (an Asus F3Jm), Master is a toggle control, and PCM is the slider that controls the system volume.  The volume hotkeys on my laptop work correctly and control the PCM slider.  However, when I open a Flash applet or an HTML5 video in Chromium, the PCM volume jumps to 100% and cannot be controlled by the hotkeys (not even muted); instead, the applet's volume control is the only way I have to control the volume.  This is not an acceptable situation for me as some sites (for example Livestream) don't remember my volume setting and start off at 100% volume every time.

Well, sometimes.  Once in a while it actually does work as expected (application volume controlled independent of system volume, and system volume can still be controlled via hotkeys), which is the part I find particularly confusing.  I haven't figured out what the situations are where it does and doesn't take over the volume control.
(EDIT: It seems that it happens the first time, and only the first time, that I start Chromium after each system boot.  So one "workaround" could be to never shut down or reboot...)

I don't believe the OSS emulation is being used, because I've unloaded and blacklisted the snd_*_oss modules and don't have alsa-oss installed.  It's possible that Chromium is using the hw device instead of the default, but I don't know how to check for this or fix it.  I don't have Firefox installed, but I suppose I could try it if someone thinks a comparison might be useful.

Package versions:
alsa-lib 1.0.22-1
chromium 4.0.249.78-3
flashplugin 10.0.42.34-1
<your requested package here>

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Last edited by tarpman (2010-02-11 17:02:44)

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Dheart

Member

From: Sofia, Bulgaria

Registered: 2006-10-26

Posts: 956

Re: Chromium takes over system volume control

ALSA doesn't support per application volume control, which would explain the behavior. That behavior, however, is still incorrect, as normally applications respect the volume level and don't overwrite it without user intervention.
A simple solution would be to switch to (at least for me) more advanced OSSv4 or use pulse audio (which I personally dislike).
You should file a bug report for chromium (or check whether you got some settings wrong).

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