Flash Audio Problems on FC2 w/ Intel AC97

[obijuan]

I know getting audio compatibility w/ Fedora 2 was a problem for many people. Other than the fact that Alsa was defaulted to a zero volume, my system was automatically configured correctly.

However, I'm using an 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller. Uses the i810_audio module according to my "Soundcard Detection" utility.

All sound works except for the MP3 soundtracks which are so prevalent in Flash files. I have the MP3 plugin for Gstreamer and XMMS but it doesn't work with flash. Sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks if you know what I mean. The only audio problem occurs w/ Flash! Everything else works great! I don't understand if this problem has something to do w/ the Fedora release not including the MP3 plugin but I think it's unrelated because the Flash player has its own. I am a web developer so I need to get flash working or no one around here can switch to linux. Which is bad.

Any help you guys can give me would be grrrrrrreatly appreciated.

Sank you.

[boyzonder]

Recently (May 26) the Flash 7 plugin was released for Linux. I don't know which version you're using (6 or 7), but try using the other one just to see if that solves anything.

[obijuan]

Both versions work the same for me. I had hoped installing the version 7 player would work, but it didn't help...

[boyzonder]

Have you tried using Flash in multiple browser (Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, konqueror)? I'm not sure if all those browsers support it, but you should try the ones that do. Also try different desktop environments, and also try disabling any sound servers (like "artsd" in KDE) that are running. I don't know if you'll still get sound then from Flash, because myself I have xmms or xmcd running all the time and don't have any other sound so I don't have this problem, but it's worth the try.

Another thing: is the kernel module really called i810_audio? Because I have a chip with AC'97
codec (nforce2 integrated audio) on a 2.6 kernel using ALSA (Fedora Core 1 upgraded) and the module is called intel8x0 if I'm not mistaken (I can't check... I can't access the machine with that chip right now).

[obijuan]

Thanks much!

I don't know why I didn't test it in Mozilla first but it does actually work there, just not in Epiphany, which I use as my default browser. Epiphany plays no sound on the MP3 soundtracks, but does play the flash sound effects.

Do you know what I might be able to do to fix this?

Also, you're right, my soundcard is listed as this:
Model: 92901DB (ICH4) AC'97 Audio Controller
Module: snd-intel8x0

I accidentally reported the listing from my FC1 box last time... Do you think Epiphany uses a different sound channel in the mixer than Mozilla does?

[boyzonder]

I can't say for sure why epiphany doesn't handle sound correctly, but I can think of two reasons.

Either the sound system epiphany uses is screwed up in some way (I'm guessing this would be some sort of GNOME sound server, since it's a GNOME browser) or, and this is quite likely, there are some patent issues involved. You probably know that xmms doesn't play mp3 out-of-the-box with Fedora, because the plugin was left out due to patent issues. Maybe the same thing's going on with epiphany (or the sound system it uses).

But again, I really don't know for sure.

Have you tried using firefox? It's faster than Mozilla but based on the same code, so it should support Flash just as well. I use it as my default browser and I'm very happy with it. Maybe an alternative for you?

[obijuan]

Thanks much... I went ahead and created a bug in bugzilla.gnome.org (143716).

Hopefully that will solve the problem. I really like Epiphany as a browser because it's a Gnome app. But it is annoying to have no sound