[linux-audio-user] XMMS and Firefox (or Flash?) not playing along nicely

Lee Revell rlrevell at joe-job.com
Fri Aug 4 14:33:58 EDT 2006


On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 11:18 -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Somehow XMMS and Firefox (or rather Firefox media plugins) seem to
> compete over sound resources.
> 
> If I start XMMS and then, say, go to YouTube to watch a video, there's
> no sound from the browser. I have to kill XMMS, browse again, then it
> works.
> I am under the impression that it only happens with Flash movies, but
> those are anyway the only ones that play directly in the browser - for
> the other formats I use the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin for Firefox
> and configured it to launch Xine for WMV, Qt and Real movies.
> 
> What's the cause and how can I fix it?

It's because your card lacks hardware mixing support and Flash only
supports the OSS API (/dev/dsp) which bypasses ALSA's software mixing.
The only solution is to get Flash to support ALSA natively, or get a
hardware mixing soundcard.

You might be able to work around this limitation of Flash by setting
FIREFOX_DSP to "aoss" in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc.

Lee




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