---
author: marco
categories:
- Howto
date: "2009-01-20T14:46:33Z"
title: Fixing bizarre sound playback in Flash Player
---

 For a while now I’ve had a strange behavior happen in Firefox on Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibex): whenever I started a flash video (e.g. in YouTube or CNN.com), the video would come out abut right, maybe a little halting, but the sound would be choppy. I would hear something that sounded about right for a fraction of a second, but then it would repeat like an echo. Turns out that an echo every fraction of a second makes the whole sound unusable.

 Given that this morning, Inauguration Day, watching video had a certain importance, I tried to address the issue. The process of addressing an issue in Ubuntu is always the same:

1. Type in an accurate description of your problem and add distribution and version into a search enging
2. Sift through all sorts of useless links: people that post the question, but nobody replies; people that post the question, and the reply is RTFM or a variant; people that post the question and the reply is private-messaged
3. Find something that vaguely sounds right (invariably on a site like ubuntuforums or linuxquestions) and try to apply it to your situation
4. Poke around your system configuration until you find the location of the problem
5. Fix the problem creatively

 This time around, the useful piece of information was to look at *about:plugin*s in Firefox. I did that and found that there were **two** versions of the Flash Player in use: 10.0.15 and 9.55. Well, that certainly would cause the problem I saw.

 Next step: find the two versions. I did a quick <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier new,courier">locate libflashplayer.so</span>, the name of the file associated with the Flash player in the plugin listing. I got, of course, two entries: one from a common location, one in my .mozilla directory.

 Which one to get rid of? Well, the one in the common directory had to come from a package file. So I searched for the corresponding package:

 <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier new,courier">dpkg -l | grep flash </span>

 As a result, I got flashplayer-nonfree, which was listed as version 10.0.15

 <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier new,courier"> ii flashplugin-nonfree 10.0.15.3ubuntu1~intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer </span>

 That was all the information I needed. I went to my local directory, which evidently had the old version, and removed the file:

 <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier new,courier"> rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/\*flash\* </span>

 Restart Firefox, and life is good again…