flash video freezes after 2-3 seconds

[orbar]

I have tried every way from Sunday to get the Adobe flash player to play videos in firefox 3.0.3 in intrepid. every time i play a flash video (youtube) it only runs for about 2 seconds, sometimes less, then the video and sound stop. moving to a different part of the video results in another 2 seconds of playback. I tried purging and reinstalling the flashplugin-nonfree package and no difference.

I'm running 8.10 on a Lenove thinkpad T61 7662 with 2.6.27-7-generic kernel

this was a clean install on 8.10 and it hasn't worked since day one. I also never had this problem in hardy

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

maybe a sound issue, but most likely its a graphics driver/chipset issue. what drivers are you using?

[orbar (orbar1)]

I'm using nvidia 177.80, the one recommended in system ==> administration ==> hardware drivers
I'm also using the default audio setup. the chipset is intel centrino vPro.
I comletely reinstalled Ubuntu and It worked for a while but after a few days I'm having the same problem, i haven't made any changes. it just stopped working all of a sudden.

[Martin Gerdzhev (mgerdjev)]

I have the same problem.
I'm running Intrepid 64bit on an ASUS F8VA. Video is Radeon HD3650
The video runs for 2-3 seconds and then it freezes completely.

[nathan (ferrisn)]

I had the same problem:
Lenovo T60
ATI Radeon Mobility X1300 (ATI Driver 8.10)
Firefox 3.0.3, 3.0.4

I upgraded to the new ATI Driver 8.11 and so far the problem has gone away.

[orbar (orbar1)]

This problem has now gone away on it own, not sure what was the problem but for a few days it didn't work at all and then it started working again

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Per submitter feedback.

[nathan (ferrisn)]

Never mind, the problem occurred again. It seems to happen randomly and I haven't found anything in particular that can reliably trigger it.

[Martin Gerdzhev (mgerdjev)]

It works now for me since the ATI update. Still sometimes it freezes on the 2-3 second but a restart of Firefox fixes that. This also happened once for me in windows as well with FIrefox so it might be something other than the drivers.

[Martin Gerdzhev (mgerdjev)]

Ok I think that I found what the problem is at least with me. I think it's a sound related issue. When I'm playing something in rhythmbox and then try to open a video in youtube it usually freezes on the 2-3 second. If I close rhythmbox and restart firefox the videos play just fine. If I open rhythmbox and try to play a song it gives me unknown playback error even if the flash video has stopped playing. If I restart the browser and then try rhythmbox again it works fine. Hope that helps.

[nathan (ferrisn)]

I also use Rhythmbox and generally leave it on all of the time. I quit rhythmbox and restarted Firefox and got a youtube video to play all the way through with no problems. I didn't get any errors while trying to play music through rhythmbox after that though. I played a song through rhythmbox and a flash video with sound through Firefox at the same time and they both worked fine.

I have an integrated intel sound chipset

[slibuntu (stuohy1)]

Guys, try disabling Ad Block Plus, it worked for me.

[Martin Gerdzhev (mgerdjev)]

I don't use Ad Block Plus. But as of a few days ago I haven't had that problem anymore. The videos don't freeze at the 2-3 second margin. Must have been one of the updates.

[Gergo Lippai (lipilee)]

Hi,

I'm having the same issue, with an intel onboard sound chipset. It is clearly a sound issue, and it seems to be an ALSA problem, although I'm not sure why it got screwed up in Intrepid when it was fine in Hardy and Gutsy, too.

Anyways, a couple of bullet points:
- For some reason i certain programs get a hold of ALSA, the problem comes up. It's not all the time, but it's definetely not just Flash and Rhythmbox either, e.g. it seems to me that (strictly sometimes) two competing instances of Flash can do the same. (It's a shame Firefox dies when Flash dies under it, but that's a separate issue and I think it might actually have to do something the closed beta piece of crap nature of Flash, not Firefox or the Ubuntu team.)
- I tried to open the Multimedia Systems Properties (that runs gstreamer-properties) and found that it dies too when trying to test ALSA. Xkill is my only relieve. If I set the Multimedia Systems to PulseAudio, it still won't work, but at least gstreamer-properties does not die. So it seems to be (again) an ALSA problem, PulseAudio just shows what it can, from the ALSA layer: nothing.
- When ALSA dies under PulseAudio, it spits the following into /var/log/messages:
  Dec 7 08:40:48 athon pulseaudio[8838]: module-alsa-sink.c: Got POLLERR from ALSA

From thar, this bug seems to be a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/194903 where it seems to be a bug with suspend and we can find a couple of ideas on how to fix it:
- rmmod'ing and modprobe'ing the sound module:
  rmmod snd-hda-intel; modprobe snd-hda-intel
- force-reloading ALSA:
  sudo /sbin/alsa-utils

None of the above worked for me so far, but there are some changes in Intrepid's sound setup (there are a lot of sound related modules, for one), so there's a lot to test and play with ;)

Hope this brings us closer to the root of the problem.

[Martin Gerdzhev (mgerdjev)]

It seems that this problem might be caused by an upgrade from a previous version of Ubuntu. As I upgraded from Hardy I have that problem with my current user. I just tried creating a new user and testing everything there and it all works just fine. Rhythmbox plays at the same time with the youtube videos and both have sound as well. Hope that helps.