Crappy sound in browser videos suddenly? Solved!

Submitted by Christoph Haas on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 17:40

On my laptop I'm running Debian Wheezy (the current "testing" branch). I used to run Ubuntu on it for two years and loved it. But without scroll bars, with the annyong Unity desktop and some especially annoying bugs with the new Xorg that kept bitching when I undocked the laptop and didn't understand two screens of different sizes I went back to the roots. That worked well for two months and I even installed every updated packages. But recently I started to hear bleeps and echos and noise in videos played in Firefox^WIceweasel. Took me a while to find the cause for that. The reason is a change in the glibc library's memcpy() call. And apparently Adobe's Flash player sucks once again and this time breaks proper audio playback in Flash applets. There are three solutions if you suffer from the audio bug:

  • wait for Adobe to fix their player (might take a few months... or years...)
  • downgrade glibc (possible - but won't work in the long run)
  • temporarily run your browser like:
    LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libc/memcpy-preload.so firefox

Care to read the whole story? Check out Debian bug 620901.

Hmmm, maybe it would have been better if there were no fix. Would keep me from wasting time on YouTube. ;)

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