Thursday, October 23, 2008

FIXED: Firefox + YouTube = No Sound

The flashplugin for Firefox on my Ubuntu box was broken for some time and I never bothered fixing it, until I decided to sell my Windows machine.

Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu OS to 8.04, and reinstalled the latest flash player from Adobe. Flash started working and I could see the YouTube videos, but there was no sound!

Actually, the sound does work if I connect speakers to the sound card. But I prefer to use the USB headphones, so that it doesn't bother others around me. And the USB works with most applications I use except for Firefox flash plugin which is used to play YouTube videos.

So, I spent few hours on Google and found a solution -

  1. Set the default sound device to "USB Audio" in System -> Preferences -> Sound
  2. Open Terminal and type - "asoundconf list" to see the sound devices. Hit [Enter] You should see a device named "default". This is the USB audio device because that's what you set the default to in the previous step.
  3. Then type - "asoundconf set-default-card default". Hit [Enter]
After this, I can hear sound from YouTube movies through the USB headphones.

Post a comment, if this blog helped you.