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konqueror: flash stalls waiting for the audio device



hi folks

it seems that recently many websites have started carrying advertisements
in flash. that means if there are nasty bugs in a browser's flash support,
it makes browsing a very unpleasant experience.

for myself, i was finding konqueror was hanging (felt like a crash)
atleast once a day. after browsing to certain web pages, all konq windows
would stall. very frustrating.

i searched the konqeuror and debian KDE mailing lists and the bugs
databases, and found a lot of other people are having a lot of trouble
with flash.

most of the discussion and bugs i found were to do with:

* the libqt-gl clashing with nsplugins and flash (but i'm running libqt,
not libqt-gl)

* people figuring out how to install netscape plugins into konq (use
Settings -> Configure Konq ... -> Netscape Plugins)

* some people claimed the were also problems with multiple copies of the
same plugin within konq's plugin search path

finally i found these bug reports:

http://bugs.kde.org/db/20/20247.html
http://bugs.kde.org/db/15/15557.html

the solution for me was to take XMMS off pause (i have no sound server
running - XMMS talks direct to the audio device because i find that i get
less glitches in playback that way).

for other people it may be more complicated if they are running a sound
daemon of some sort. one of the above bugs mentions that flash works with
ESD but not artsd.

realplayer has (or atleast had) the same stalling problem. it'd be nice if
Macromedia and RealNetworks would add some error checking and give the
user some feedback instead of just blocking.

i strongly suggest adding this info to the konq FAQ:

http://www.konqueror.org/faq.html#flash

which currently only mentions the opengl problem.

at any rate, i have above tried to document this situation in the hope
that this message may help some other people, both members of the
debian-kde list, and people doing a web search to try and solve this
problem.

however, i suspect many of the sort of people who enjoy the
user-friendliness of konqueror, might instead be turned off altogether by
this dodgy behaviour. only certain determined geeks like me will sit
down and spend an hour doing a web search to isolate a problem like
this.

of course, the main problems seem to be beyond the konqueror developers
control, but it's something to be aware of.

cheers,
maffew.



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