Arch Linux

Link64

Member

Registered: 2015-02-10

Posts: 10

[SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new to arch and I already have a problem that I had similiar on Debian testing.

So right now, whenever I try to start a flash Video from different Websites, it is unable to play sound at all. The YouTube/Google Player even recognizes that something with the sound and stops working at all. It restarts the video a few times after I can see like the first few seconds of it without sound and after a few tries it tells me that "Something went wrong[.]" and that I should "Try again later."

Since that won't work I should maybe mention what I guess what the problem is and how I "fixed" it at all.

So I have installed KDE4 on my system with the flashplugin that has been offered by pacman. As far as my understanding for audio in Linux works, we need something like a Soundserver that catches all the sound that is going to the sound card and instead mixes it all together and then sends that to the soundcard, since there can usually only be one application holding the connection to the physical audio device. In the past, I always relied on pulseaudio since that has been mostly working for me.

Unfortunately for me KDE offers the "Phonon Backend" and I have absolutely no clue what this is for. Even though I read the wiki article, I still don't know what it actually does or how it works. It just feels incomprehensible for me. Sorry for that. Anyways, it looked like it works similiar to pulseaudio just with some bonus features but when using Debian on KDE, it just didn't work at all. My devices were not listed properly, and whenever I tried to hear something on at least 1 device that was actually right, nothing happened. I "fixed" it by just using apt to get pulse installed and it magically worked and I haven't had problems with it anymore.

Anyways, back to my current problem: Phonon seems to recognize my sound devices properly now and I can play the testing sound and it looks alright. Unfortunately for me, flash still doesn't work. Even though most other applications seemed to work I decided to maybe just try to install pulseaudio but, it looks like it did nothing at all. I can not even find something in the system settings gui for audio about pulse. I don't know if I have to enable it but I am slightly curious about it now.

My problem is similiar to this here but I couldn't solve it with it.

TL;DR Flashplayer has no sound. Pulseaudio seems not to work. How do I configure sound?

Last edited by Link64 (2015-02-15 12:26:57)

darksyntax

Member

From: 10.242.166.156

Registered: 2015-02-15

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

@Link64,

Have you checked your GUI audio mixer? Sometimes the channels you really need could be muted.

If this is specific to just flash sound and have you attempted to use google-chrome-stable from the AUR?
Google-chrome-stable uses a different flash plugin than the one contained for firefox.

I'm not a KDE nut, I've always had the best of luck with XFCE4 if you ever want to try that desktop environment

You may want to reinstall the pulseaudio and alsa-plugins packages, I don't think it would hurt.

Edit: You probably should have posted this in Multimedia and Games. I'm not hating though.

Last edited by darksyntax (2015-02-15 04:03:58)

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,219

Re: [SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

If you are using pulse, have you tried running pavucontrol and check the port used for output?

Does sound work in general as in from an music player or any other source besides a web browser?  Which web browser are you using? Do you have your alsa backend configured correctly?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ad … chitecture

Link64

Member

Registered: 2015-02-10

Posts: 10

Re: [SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

Thanks for the quick replies.

Edit: You probably should have posted this in Multimedia and Games. I'm not hating though.

You are probaply right. So, if an admin is reading this, would you be so kind and move this thread? Thanks!

I'm not a KDE nut, I've always had the best of luck with XFCE4 if you ever want to try that desktop environment

Me too, still is just like the visuals of KDE more. If it is not going to work I am probaply switching back.

So, back to the Problem:

Have you checked your GUI audio mixer? Sometimes the channels you really need could be muted.

Aye, and that's definitely not the problem since other applications are able tho play sound though.

You may want to reinstall the pulseaudio and alsa-plugins packages, I don't think it would hurt.

Just did it, but it didn't change anything.

If this is specific to just flash sound and have you attempted to use google-chrome-stable from the AUR?
Google-chrome-stable uses a different flash plugin than the one contained for firefox.

I could try this but I stick with firefox.

If you are using pulse, have you tried running pavucontrol and check the port used for output?

So, thats where it get interesting (I should have probaply tried this before). So, pavucontrol tells me that Pulseaudio is not running or at least that it can not connect to it. It seems like I've been just really dumb. When I start pulseadio manually as a deamon... It works...

So anyways, thanks for the help so far. I am still wondering why pulseaudio is not started automatically, since I have the pulseaudio.desktop file in my autostart directory. Anyways, I will flag this as solved, but I'd be pleased if you could help me with the autostart problem.

Thanks for the quick replies and sorry for being THAT stupid :S

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,219

Re: [SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

Read pulseaudio wiki.

Last edited by frank604 (2015-02-15 15:03:40)

darksyntax

Member

From: 10.242.166.156

Registered: 2015-02-15

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Videos in Flashplugin are unable to play audio

With that being said,

If you are already inside your X environment.

$ start-pulseaudio-x11

Check to see if its running.

$ pgrep -af pulseaudio

This was my output.

[jordan@limpd ~]$ pgrep -af pulseaudio
7419 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

To get it to autostart, you could attempt to add it to systemd.

# systemctl enable pulseaudio
# systemctl start pulseaudio

^^ I am not sure the exact bin name so you maybe have to change the names in the command.

We'll all be around

Last edited by darksyntax (2015-02-15 20:44:34)