Monday 3 January 2011

Fedora 14 64 bit : Distorted Sounds From Flash Player "SQUARE"

If you have been using the new 64 bit beta of Flash Player ("Square") on Fedora 14, you might have noticed that some audio streams are distorted by a weird metallic noise that seems to emanate from the background. Apparently this is caused by a patch to glibc - which removes support for overlapping regions in memcpy. Although this is the right thing to do and clearly Adobe is using memcpy in a non-standard way, it's an annoying bug for non-techie users who don't really care much about whether an application is doing the "right thing" under the hood. 

There are several solutions for the problem at the moment:
I have tried the first two and they both work perfectly.

For those interested, the full Bugzilla thread can be found at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477