Java Thinking

I've finally fixed sound via the browser on my Ubuntu 11.04 MythTV media center. MythTV was working fine, but the browsers never even tried to play sound (the sound settings would show NO applications using sound, when Chrome or Firefox should have been). The information I needed was here and I had no /etc/asound.conf so I had to put the following in ~/.asoundrc - pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse { type pulse } pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse }

I recently lost sound via mplayer on my MythTV mediacenter. This affected any of my video collection that weren't DVD iso images since mplayer was the configured player for most types. At first I thought it might have been related to doing a system update, but now I think it was related to my tinkering which got interrupted by the kids - and then promptly forgotten about. Days or weeks later, I was surprised to find the sound missing when playing videos (rarely done - I usually watch the recordings or DVDs which use the internal player). Now that I've fixed the issue, the problem is obvious. I have a Gigabyte motherboard and I use the SPDIF output to take the sound via optical cable into my surround sound receiver. In the video setup, I had the default player set to mplayer with the command: mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv %s This directed sound to the SPDIF output. But, when using MythStream, no sound came out when watching things such as the Apple movi...

Sound on my Dell 1525 notebook has always been dodgy under Linux. On windows it runs fine, but under Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) sound is very low - it only becomes audible at 50% volume, so at full volume it is quiet. The real show-stopper is that Skype is unusable since the microphone is also severely attenuated. Doing a test call on Skype results in a barely audible playback. I've spent several hours here and there, looking for solutions. The latest adventure lead me to forum posts from 2006 which lead me from resource to resource until I finally came to SoundTroubleShooting which is probably where I should have started. From here I reached the ALSA Intel supported hardware list. Turns out my hardware is not supported: paul@dell1525:~$ lspci | grep -i audio 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) The ICH8 is not listed as supported hardware. The solution is to get a supported sound card. My workaround means I'm going to have to us...