Monday 29 March 2010

No sound in flash on AMD 64 Kubuntu

The standard ubuntu/kubuntu installation breaks sound in flash. There are several reasons for this, the first that Kubuntu/Ubuntu uses pulse audio and flash (along with many other applications) doesn't play nicely with pulseaudio. However, PulseAudio problems is just the first of two issues. The second is that Adobe 32 bit flash cannot share audio devices and output sound in the shared environment. For that you need the 64 bit version.

So the first port of call in Kubuntu is to go to system settings/multimedia/device preference/audio output/Music and bump PulseAudio to the preferred (top) device.

Click on "test" to make sure that pulseaudio is actually working on your system. If you don't have a sound coming out, you need to first get pulseaudio working properly.

Next, you need to download the 64bit version of flash from Adobe and you can do this here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html

(note the above is for version 10, you may wish to check that it's still the latest 64bit version).

Unzip the file. It gives you a libflashplayer.so file.

Now you need to overwrite this for firefox (and other applications that use flash).

For example in my system, in my user home directory, I have ~/.mozilla/plugins/
This is the directory that firefox/mozilla/chrome loads flash from. So I copy the file into this directory, overwriting the existing 32 bit version.

You may want to

sudo find / -name libflashplayer.so -print

to find out where this file is elsewhere on your system and update it there too.