Because I can't get mplayer-plugin to work in Firefox 2, I'm using the Flash 9 beta to play videos.
My problem is that the sound playback is fuzzy, apparently due to the motion on the screen because minimizing the window corrects the sound. Of course, the goal is to have audio *and* video working at the same time.

Anyone else have this problem? Suggestions would be most appreciated.

Could it be related to processor speed/capacity? Is it loaded too much during video playback?

I'm away from my Linux box right now, but I don't remember Conky showing anything ridiculous (under 50% CPU, over 100MB free RAM, almost no swap usage).

I can't help you with Flash 9 ... cuz I have problems with it too.

But maybe I can help you get mplayer-plugin working:

1) Install mplayer (recommend getting it from linuxpackages) (It will need some dependencies which can all be obtained at linuxpackages as well)
2) Install mplayer codecs (make sure they are extracted to and located at both /usr/lib/codecs and /usr/lib/win32 (symlink one to the other or something))
3) Download mplayer-plugin, then it's better to extract NOT install the package. Then from inside the package cd into usr/lib/mozilla, and there should be 2 folders components and plugins, copy both of these into ~/.mozilla.
4) Restart FF 2.0 and it will work.

Flash 9 final is out now, and it works much better for me. Pages would "freeze" for about 10 seconds if they had flash on them for me with beta. That doesn't happen anymore. I can't help you much with the sound problem, except you could try logging out and then back in. That should free up your soundcard from any programs that were hogging it.

I am having an issue with Flash Player 9 as well. But mine is different. I upgraded once and everything seemed to work fine. Then, everything started to say "Requires Flash Upgrade" again. I upgrade Flash 9 again and it still won't seem to work. I noticed in some places it seems like it still mentions Flash 7. Is there any way to get rid of this?

Just add the user to the audio group in /etc/group and all your audio related problem will go away.

I had the same problem and that was the end of it.

Never mind, I fixed my problem.

How about letting everyone know how you fixed it. Might help someone else out.

I just manually deleted libflashplayer.so from /usr/lib/firefox/plugins and then installed flash player 9. sorry.