Flash/AVI/Skype sound issue in Squeeze

[Jason Filippou <jason.filippou@gmail.com>]

Hello list,

I'm having trouble with my sound in a rather fresh Testing box on KDE.
Before I lay down the situation, let me clarify that I have googled,
rather extensively, in pursuit of a solution to my problem, yet I have
not found a solution that solves my problem. So, instead of turning my
system into a bundle of conflicting packages very possibly unrelated
to my problem, I decided to post my inquiry here. Now to the
presentation:

My sound works well for system sounds and notifications, such as the
music playing when logging into KDE and when emptying the trash. I can
also listen to music through Amarok and have sound from games as well
(namely, Tremulous). However, I do NOT have any sound from flash
player (I have installed flashplugin-nonfree) in both Iceweasel and
Konqueror or any sound from AVI videos (tested through vlc). I also
get a "Problem with Audio Playback" when making calls through Skype,
but I can live without Skype.

Here is what the "iceweaselrc" file says about my /dev/dsp wrapper for
iceweasel:


jason@debian:~$ sudo nano /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc

# which /dev/dsp wrapper to use
ICEWEASEL_DSP="aoss"

I have tried setting it to all the other values that the iceweasel
manpage says there are, yet still no luck.

Here is what lspci -v says about my hardware sound (I have omitted
output unrelated to audio devices or controllers):

jason@debian:~$ lspci -v

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio
Controller (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio
Controller
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
        Memory at fdff8000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel

01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation Device 0be2 (rev a1)
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
        Memory at fcffc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>

And below are some screenshots from system settings->multimedia

http://s128.photobucket.com/albums/p190/Bulgarian_Toothpaste/?action=view&current=multimedia1.png

http://s128.photobucket.com/albums/p190/Bulgarian_Toothpaste/?action=view&current=multimedia2.png

I have installed the following packages possibly related to my issue,
after googling a bit:

libasound libasound2-doc alsa-base alsa-utils alsa-oss alsamixergui

May I also note that after running iceweasel with an "aoss" wrapper

jason@debian:~$ aoss /usr/lib/iceweasel/iceweasel

I see the following output on the terminal, repeated constantly:

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1010:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

Yet I still get no sound.

I'd like to add that I've examined the terminal output  after choosing
my Debian partition from Grub and noted the string:

Setting up ALSA... done.

kmix is well set and configured, and so is alsamixergui.

Might there be any solution to my problem?

I believe this is all I can provide you with for now, please do not
hesitate to ask for more information and I shall give it.

Thanks,
J