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.

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