Whenever I try to watch a youtube video in firefox, I get 1 of 2 behaviors:

1) if its got an advertisement, it shows a couple seconds of the ad's video, then it hiccups and skips the advertisement, then crashes on the video.

2) of there's no advertisement, it will just play, but there will be no audio.

If I try to watch it in google-chrome I just get video with no audio. In the command window, this appears:

ALSA lib pcm.c:7431snd_pcm_set_params) Rate doesn't match (requested 44100Hz, get 0Hz)
ALSA lib pcm.c:7442snd_pcm_set_params) Unable to set period time 23219 for PLAYBACK: Invalid argument

I'm configured for HDMI out, using this method to get it working:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2310

and it works fine for VLC or aplay

Any ideas what's going on here?

Ok, found some new strange behavior. If I have VLC and youtube playing at the same time, VLC will work as normal (with HDMI audio) and youtube no longer crashes, but the audio for it comes out of the laptop speakers, so I have two different sound sources simultaneously.

Flash only uses the first audio output - I expect you will get sound from your laptops headphone jack (there are probably 2 soundcards - one is the normal headphone jack and laptop speakers, the other one is HDMI) I would look into making HDMI the default using the .asound.conf file - theres a good post about it somewhere on here but then you will not get flash sound from the headphone jack...

Is that not what I've already done following the crunchback link?

(I used my HDMI card/device numbers following kBang's instrucitons)

Flash will only look at the first card - it needs to be set in /etc/modprobe.d/ as explained in this link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...device-906741/
it maybe that this isn't the issue but I has problems with flash until I did something similar to this (your sound modules will probably be different - use lsmod to see what is being loaded.

So, using lsmod, I see a module called:

so, in /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf (which is empty) I add the line:

But to no avail. When I boot, it says "ignoring bad line in modprobe"

currently trying post #7 here:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/g...ube-issue.html

I think the underscores need to be hyphens (- not _) in the module name

This solution made it so that youtube videos worked with sound, but they didn't play through HDMI, they played through the laptop speakers, and when I tried to use VLC, it said "defualt audio device not found" and went to the speakers (whereas before it had found HDMI as default).

So this makes me think that my HDMI is successfully set as default and is just having some problem communicating with youtube, since youtube works fine when it uses laptop speakers. Only when HDMI is set as default does it crash.

I will try your suggestion now though (- not _) though they appear in lsmod as _.

Same result as previous post. Now youtube doesn't crash, but it completely ignores HDMI (and vlc ssays no "can't open ALSA device default: no such file or directory"

and at startup:
"failed to obtain info for control #1"
(does this for #1, #2, #3, #4, #5)

So I'm starting to think that when youtube crashes, it's when it's successfully using the HDMI card.