Advert audio issues

[WeaselWords]

Hey there,
I'm using the latest version of Opera on my Fedora 14 64-bit system (laptop).
I've managed to get Flashplayer working just fine on sites like YouTube, and the audio is working flawlessly on the actual videos... but not on the mandatory advertisements.
This has me totally stumped. I've no idea why the audio would only be 'fuzzy' on adverts, but nowhere else. The audio of the adverts sounds as if it is coming through a cheap voice converter, and the sound additionally pulses and blips throughout.

To note, this is not a YouTube-specific issue, as I have noticed the same on other video sites, as well as during Pandora.com's between-song audio advertisements.

EDIT: I have also noticed this issue with the same blips and pulses when I try to stream songs from Bandcamp.com. My guess is that I'm missing some sort of audio plug-in or dependency, but I don't know what exactly.
Additionally, this issue is present in Firefox in the same areas. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

[bjpatrick]

I have the same damn problem and have no clue how to fix it.

[WeaselWords]

I don't remember this problem being present previous to the recent Linux kernel update, but I'm not sure if those two things have anything to do with each other.
I've tried updating Flash, as well as completely removing it and reinstalling it. I've also played around with disabling certain audio plug-ins to no avail.

[mindfaq]

Originally Posted by WeaselWords

I don't remember this problem being present previous to the recent Linux kernel update, but I'm not sure if those two things have anything to do with each other.

Nope, it has nothing to do with that. This is a known issue, though, which is caused by a broken Flash plugin. It occurs due to Flash taking assumptions about certain behaviour when all relevant specifications say you really shouldn't do this. Through pure luck, this worked in the past. Now some Intel developers wrote a performance enhancement patch for glibc which changed that behaviour (which you must not rely on). Adobe did and so their software went up in flames.

They are aware of the issue and are committed to fix it. This may take some time, though. Due to flash's proprietary nature, Fedora developers are not able to (and not legally allowed to) fix it.

You are not expieriencing it the whole time because the broken behaviour in flash seems to be restricted to certain codecs (e.g. MP3) while others are not effected. Youtube does not use MP3 for audio with the exception of the lowest quality vids (and advertisements, as it seems). It only occurs in F14 because previous versions didn't incorporate the new glibc code.

You can track the state of the bug at Adobe's public bugtracker.

[WeaselWords]

Thanks for the information, at least I know what's causing the trouble now.
I've recently installed Zenwalk, and the problem is not present there, so is this a Fedora-specific issue?

[mindfaq]

It's not Fedora-specific but specific to what will become the v2.13 release of glibc. Zenwalk, even in its recent 7.0 alpha release, doesn't ship such a new glibc. Today Fedora is the only distro I know of that does. As time passes the other distros will also switch to the new release. If they are lucky things get sorted out until then. When living on the edge by using the latest and greatest one is usually also the first to encounter problems with the new stuff. In this case the new software works fine but that doesn't help much if someone else's legacy stuff misbehaves when combined.

There are several solutions to work around the issue. One is downgrading glibc to some older version like 2.12 (not 2.12.90 which is 2.13 prerelease) as it is shipped in Fedora 13. Another way is to write a simple (but maybe slower) replacement and make the browser (and Flash) use it through LD preloading. This is described here. None of them I'd consider a sane solution but they'd make stuff work until Adobe releases an appropriate fix for the issue.

edit: Running the i386 version of flash should also work. Even when used on 64 bit systems (with nspluginwrapper) it would have to use the 32 bit glibc. AFAIK the faster memcpy (which Flash can't handle) is only implemented for 64 bit.