Flash, Pulseaudio, and Linux

[RoyGBiv]

I've been having problems playing Flash videos for about six months now. It had become progressively worse, mainly with the audio stuttering and skipping and popping but I had suffered through. It didn't happen always, but it happened frequently, and the skipping generally only occurred while the video was still loading. So, I could just pause it and wait. I'd still experience pops and wheezes, but they weren't as bad.

Well, last night, it got to be too much. I'm sick (I have the flu, but thankfully not *the* flu) and irritable, which was part of the problem. However, the issue itself progressed to a new level of annoyance wherein I started hearing what sounded like a feedback whine.

So, I started investigating.

About 24 hours later, I managed to fix the problem entirely as well as seemingly fix a couple other issues I hadn't realized were related.

I'd assumed all along it was a sound driver problem, which it was essentially, having something to do with pulseaudio, which is still rather buggy. But, I didn't want to uninstall pulseaudio because it works well for everything else. Before I went to that extreme, I started searching for another source, tried half a dozen things before deferring to google. When doing so I discovered the solution was so simple that I'm now kicking myself in the back of the head for not having tried to fix this before.

rpm -e libflashsupport

What this little crappy library does is, among other things, provide pulseaudio support for Flash video. Well, it doesn't work properly, in part due to some overly optimistic scheduling and buffering issues with pulseaudio itself. I'd fixed that through the configuration files when I'd first installed the system, and that had been fine for everything else that used the audio hardware, but *not* Flash. I'd even tried forcing Flash to use ALSA via an environment variable, but this just made all sound go away, which struck me as quite odd. I removed that library, kept the environment variable the same, and now sound is back, and it is, finally, smooooooth.

The other issues this seems to have addressed are the occasional instance of Flash not unloading once the video was closed, which could end up pegging CPU usage at around 30%, and frequent lockups when attempting to play a video at all. I'm not sure on either of these yet, but I note that I could generally recreate these problems by doing certain things, and I haven't been able to do so since uninstalling the library.

I'd seen on some forums mention of the fact that libflashsupport is buggy, but I'd never heeded the advice because the description of problems others were having didn't fit my problem.

Anyway ... just thought I'd share my personal victory.