youtube sound, ubuntu, chromium [solved]

well, i'm having an issue with chromium-browser in ubuntu 9.10. i apparently have a similar issue that i had with firefox 3.5, where the sound would stop working in the browser. all i really need is to figure out a way to reinitialize the sound portion of the browser. i realize a restart of chromium-browser should fix the problem, but i'm trying to figure out how to get it working without having to restart the browser. the great thing about firefox, was i could kill the plugin-container process, and then restart youtube (what i primarily use sound for in the browser), and it would restart the flash plugin. i guess that actually has given me an idea. hey, writing does help thought processes! i'll investigate the plugin section of the browser and see what that does in chromium...

well, there was nothing in preferences, so it looks like the plugin needs to be built in. i'll have to search my file-system for chromium to see what i can find...

locate chromium
cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins
ls

...plugins folder is empty.

i'm starting to think it's not possible to reinitialize sound without restarting...well, let's see what chromium does when i restart it, will it save all my tabs? answer, nope. so restarting will really be a problem. i had two sessions of chromium open, i closed my "play" session.

i also checked ~/.config/chromium to see if i could find anything in there that might help, but couldn't find anything. i think the only way to fix the problem is to look at the source code, so i am probably stuck restarting chrome, because figuring out the source code is impossible for me (i looked at the firefox source, and i couldn't make heads or tails of it).

anyway, maybe someone out there might have an idea, otherwise i'm going to download the source and poke around a little. maybe even try compiling it myself. there's an idea...

i found this site. there is some info here, like getting a stabler build. i'll probably look into tomorrow, since downloading the chromium source wasn't even possible with sudo apt-get source chromium-browser. i did try the html5 youtube version but i had the same trouble with sound not working. i did notice that in sound preferences it lists chromium as using alsa. probably an issue with the alsa/pulseaudio conundrum that i've heard about in GNU/Linux distros. still no solution yet.

SOLVED UPDATE

Well, looks like i found a solution of sorts. I found out that google had a Chrome version for linux from ubuntu-beginners-team channel. So i installed chrome from google's chrome website. The sound problem has recurred yet.

NOT SOLVED UPDATE

Ah, looks like the bug reoccurred. Not sure why. So it happens in Chrome and Chromium. My guess is it has something to do with the alsa/pulse audio/flash system. Perhaps the multiple process approach is causing the problem in Chrome after enough tabs are open? I don't know, just speculating at this point. But it kind of sucks. I might just go back to using firefox, I don't know. I kind of like features of Chrome now, but can't beat the "sound feature" that only works part of the time.

SOLVED UPDATE

Just figured out flash can be restarted using the chrome task manager (shift-esc). Turn off the shockwave flash plugin, reload page, sound works without restarting chrome \o/.