After (and sometimes, while watching) flash videos, I got no sound at all

[Guilherme Sanchez]

After a few minutes watching to flash videos with sound I got no sound at all from my system. Restarting alsa-utils and pulseaudio doesn't work.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with a fresh install and I've installed flash plugin via Synaptic.

My hardware:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M266 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5500] (rev a1)

Flash version:
    File name: libflashplayer.so
    Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124
I've installed later libflashsupport but this problem persists.

[Update]
After a reboot this error no longer occurred, but now, in some flash video, randomly, firefox crashes with no apparent reason, no error, no nothing, simply closes and nothing more.

By the way, with this new sound system, Pulse Audio, the sound gone away with no apparent reason, then all sound appear all in the same time... Appears that we have some downgrade here, we are backing in time, in the era were the sound system only permited one sound per time... Strange...

[Sidarth Dasari (sirsid)]

Do you see anything in /var/log/messages?

[Guilherme Sanchez (gsanchez-xnetrj)]

This happened minutes ago, I was playing Frozen Bubble and talkins with a friend of mine in Pidgin, then suddenly was only able to listen to th sounds that came from Frozen, not form Pidgin. I take a look at /var/log/messages which gave me this:

gsanchez@ubuntu:~$ tail /var/log/messages
May 8 21:20:55 ubuntu kernel: [ 50.940366] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.8
May 8 21:20:58 ubuntu kernel: [ 53.311909] agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
May 8 21:20:58 ubuntu kernel: [ 53.311932] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
May 8 21:20:58 ubuntu kernel: [ 53.311989] agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
May 8 21:40:53 ubuntu -- MARK --
May 8 22:00:53 ubuntu -- MARK --
May 8 22:20:53 ubuntu -- MARK --
May 8 22:40:53 ubuntu -- MARK --
<b>May 8 22:44:59 ubuntu pulseaudio[5435]: pstream.c: Failed to import memory block.</b>
May 8 22:54:50 ubuntu kernel: [ 5678.400148] sr0: CDROM not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.

As a workaround, is there any way of disabling pulse audio as sound system and revert it to Alsa as the way it was before 8.04?

[Sidarth Dasari (sirsid)]

I think you can do that in System >> Preferences >> Sound

Pulse audio is causing lots of problems including full system lockups and weird sound bits like this.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 10:41:24PM -0000, Guilherme Sanchez wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> After a few minutes watching to flash videos with sound I got no sound
> at all from my system. Restarting alsa-utils and pulseaudio doesn't
> work.
>
> I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with a fresh install and I've installed flash
> plugin via Synaptic.

this is a duplicate of the libflashsupport bug

 duplicate 192888

and should be resolved once the real fix for that lands

thanks,

 - Alexander