Planet Geek!: Firefox, ALSA, Flash, YouTube, Google Video and SOUND!

[penk]

This one's been bugging me for a while. I run Firefox on yawl and hunter pretty constantly, and occasionally would like to view some of the videos posted on YouTube or videos.google.com. While the videos have been playing just fine, sound has never worked.

Sound is always a tricky thing on Linux machines. Although ALSA has solved many of the audio problems that have traditionally plagued Linux boxes, many applications have not ported to the new interface, and therefore won't work on modern systems.

After finally getting frustrated enough to take the time to do some research, I found a post that described how to do it.

First, for all Debian based distributions, there's a very handy 'interface' package called alsa-oss, which, according to the description:

...contains a program loader, aoss, which wraps applications written for OSS in a compatibility library, thus allowing them to work with ALSA.

Sounds good to me! First, I had to install the package:

apt-get install alsa-oss

Next, a change to Firefox's configuration to tell it to use said interface:

cd /etc/firefox
edit 'firefoxrc' and change
FIREFOX_DSP="none"
to
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

Stop and restart Firefox.

That's it! Enjoy videos in full sound and motion like sharks being attacked and eaten by octupi.

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Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
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