Resolved audio problems whenn viewing flash sites through firefox

While using firefox to browse flash based sites like google videos, you tube e.tc. no audio was available, though video was perfect. The reason is although firefox uses a daemon libesd, falsh programs directly use the device file /dev/dsp which can be opened only once. Whatever problems that existed with flash and sound was being taken care of by a wrapper script provided by esd. But this was a very inefficient method as outlined in the bug report.

The workout around or way to fix it, is to use alsa.
First remove esd from the system.

apt-get remove esound esound-clients

Restart firefox and audio should be available now.

If this doesnt fix it, then install also-oss

apt-get install alsa-oss

Ran across this solution here

Download files from google videos.

Check out this post on googlesystem blog . It links to a cool greasemonkey script, that allows you to download videos from popular video hosting sites like google, youtube, myspace, metacafe, clipfish...e.t.c.

Greasemonkey looks pretty cool. The basic concept with this extension to firefox is you can write user javascripts which you can customize to run whenever you hit a particular webpage or a group of webpages, choice is yours. Hmm..I had been thinking of learning javascript when I had heard about greasemonkey, but that like most of my endeavors sunk without a trace...sigh...!!!

pssst..don't let big brother hear ya, Iam going to learn javascript ;) !!!