492. Briefly: fixing no sound when playing youtube videos in chrome, iceweasel/firefox

Not sure what caused this, but I suddenly had no sound when playing flash videos in the browser.

Playing flv files using e.g. mplayer works fine. I'm using pulseaudio, and have an ~/.asoundrc file:

pcm.!default.type pulse
ctl.!default.type pulse

alsamixer is working fine and the channels are unmuted.

The solution:
I moved ~/.macromedia to ~/.xmacromedia as suggested at the end of this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=134892.

Didn't even need to restart the browser -- suddenly everything worked.

The question is why is there a ~/.macromedia folder, and what does it do? Might have a look into that at some later point.

31. Update flash -- chrome on debian wheezy/testing 64 bit

You may have had problems playing flash videos recently and have been presented with a message saying that your player is out of date, and that you can either play (just this time) or upgrade. Clicking on upgrade takes you to the adobe website -- downloading the file is easy enough, but then what?

Well, here's how to upgrade.
Download the file install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz
extract the libflashplayer.so file from the root of the compressed file

Figure out what files to replace:

locate libflashplayer.so
yields
/usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so

So, in the directory where you put your new libflashplayer.so
sudo cp libflashplayer.so usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so
and
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so


Restart your browser, and you should be good to go.

12. Pulseaudio - controlling where the output goes

The non-free flash plugin can be a bit of a headache, since even if you install it and flash videos play nicely, you may not get any sound. On a laptop, you might not notice it, since the default output seems to be the laptop speakers. However, you may have problems piping the sounds through any attached USB speakers. Same goes for desktops, where the default output may be the sounds ports on your motherboard.

The fix is simple (assuming you have pulseaudio installed)
create an /etc/asound.conf file or a ~/.asoundrc file, with the following in it:

pcm.!default.type pulse
ctl.!default.type pulse

Rebooting should take care of things