Help me understand Flash problem

[nomail1983]

Please help me understand a Flash problem. It is now mysteriously
fixed, but I would like to understand how.

I had uninstalled and re-installed the latest Adobe Flash (version
9). But when I went to a particular web (AARP driving safety "test
drive"), I did not get any audio.

I tried all the obvious things. I toggled the speaker off and on;
sliding the volume to the max. The audio and speaker hardware worked;
I was able to hear the audio on an e-card that I received recently.
In IE6, I enabled every add-on, cleared history and deleted cookies
and temp files (including offline content). I restarted the system.

"What made it work finally?" I think it was when I tried to play a
movie with RealPlayer. It used to work just fine; but now I was not
getting audio. Even though the RP speaker button indicated that it
was on, I decided to toggle it off and on. Voila! Audio out of RP.
Later, I tried the AARP "test drive" again. Voila! Audio out of
Flash.

What gives!?

I have a laptop. I can toggle volume on/off and control the volume 2
or 3 ways, depending on the application. I have keyboard buttons. I
have the speaker status icon on the right side of the desktop
toolbar. And in the case of RP, I can toggle volume on/off and
control the volume. (There might be a 4th way: the Control Panel.
But I ass-u-me that's the same as the speaker status icon.)

I had ass-u-me-d that these are just 3 ways of doing the same thing.
For example, I thought I could turn off the volume using the keyboard,
then turn it on using the speaker status icon or RP control.

Now I conclude that there are layers of control. Or perhaps it has
something to do with the registry.

Can someone give me an architectural overview of how all these
controls interact (or not)?

 

[Vanguard]

Please help me understand a Flash problem. It is now mysteriously
fixed, but I would like to understand how.

I had uninstalled and re-installed the latest Adobe Flash (version
9). But when I went to a particular web (AARP driving safety "test
drive"), I did not get any audio.

I tried all the obvious things. I toggled the speaker off and on;
sliding the volume to the max. The audio and speaker hardware worked;
I was able to hear the audio on an e-card that I received recently.
In IE6, I enabled every add-on, cleared history and deleted cookies
and temp files (including offline content). I restarted the system.

"What made it work finally?" I think it was when I tried to play a
movie with RealPlayer. It used to work just fine; but now I was not
getting audio. Even though the RP speaker button indicated that it
was on, I decided to toggle it off and on. Voila! Audio out of RP.
Later, I tried the AARP "test drive" again. Voila! Audio out of
Flash.

What gives!?

I have a laptop. I can toggle volume on/off and control the volume 2
or 3 ways, depending on the application. I have keyboard buttons. I
have the speaker status icon on the right side of the desktop
toolbar. And in the case of RP, I can toggle volume on/off and
control the volume. (There might be a 4th way: the Control Panel.
But I ass-u-me that's the same as the speaker status icon.)

I had ass-u-me-d that these are just 3 ways of doing the same thing.
For example, I thought I could turn off the volume using the keyboard,
then turn it on using the speaker status icon or RP control.

Now I conclude that there are layers of control. Or perhaps it has
something to do with the registry.

Can someone give me an architectural overview of how all these
controls interact (or not)?

It sounds like you toggled the volume mute in RealPlayer. Might've also
worked in Windows Media Player or any other application that lets you
mute the audio. The toggling managed to set the mute to the correct
state. Apparently Flash got out of sync with the mute setting in the
registry.

As an experiment, I used InstallWatch to see what registry changes were
made when I changed from unmuted to muted and from muted to unmuted.
What I saw were:

Unmuted:
Key =
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0018\Settings\Ac97
Data item = MasterMute
Data value = hex:0,0,0,0

Muted:
Key =
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0018\Settings\Ac97
Data item = MasterMute
Data value = hex:1,0,0,0

Flash has its own .sol cookies, one of which is the master cookie for
your settings. Go to any site with Flash and right-click on the Flash
content and select Settings. Notice that while there is a selection for
microphone input sensitivity that there is no setting for output volume
level, so I suspect that Flash doesn't use its own audio player but
relies on whatever audio application is associated with the filetype for
the audio. Maybe that was your RealPlayer app.

Did you ever open the sound mixer (by double-clicking on the tray icon
for volume control) to check that the master and wave volume sliders
were at acceptable levels and that wave wasn't set to muted (you can
separately mute different audio types)? It is also possible that you
have another mixer controller program installed for your particular
chipset or soundcard. For example, my mobo uses the nForce chipset so I
have the NvMixer app installed that can also control muting and volume
levels.

 

[nomail1983]

It sounds like you toggled the volume mute in RealPlayer. Might've also
worked in Windows Media Player or any other application that lets you
mute the audio. The toggling managed to set the mute to the correct
state. Apparently Flash got out of sync with the mute setting in the
registry.

Thanks for the explanation. I will have to study this further.