Flashplayer freezes

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007, Kai Wüstermann wrote:

> If I watch a video on youtube with firefox there is no sound and the
> video freezes after 10 or 20 seconds. The video still is downloading and
> you can stop and restart the video, but then it freezes aft a few
> seconds.
> 
> If you quit firefox it disapears from screen, but ps axu shows that it
> is still in memory.
> 
> I think it's a problem with puls-audio. Xmms can't connect to sound
> after using flash until you kill the chrashed firefox. 

This is all prefixed "As far as I understand", so apologies if anything is
inaccurate.

Flash sound has always been a problem on thin clients.  The reason
historically has been Flash tended to have one hard coded sound access
method -- usually an out-of-date one.  So, until not too long ago, Flash
insisted on using the old OSS sound card method, directly locking the sound
card so nothing else could play and it couldn't start playing unless
nothing else (like esd) was accessing the sound card.

I think the situation now is that Flash uses Alsa by default.  This
probably solves some issues, in that Alsa is more modern and may take more
than one input and A/V syncing works.  However, using ALSA still means it's
trying to send the sound out the server's sound card.

For thin clients to work, we'd need flash to play through the pulseaudio
device, which relays it out to the sound card on the thin client.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/29760

It seems that this can now be done, with an extra add-on to Flash to gve it
support for pulseaudio.  I haven't tried this myself, though I may give it
a bash soon as it seems like it would be great to have if it works.

http://pulseaudio.revolutionlinux.com/PulseAudio

Has anyone else tried this?

Gavin