Flash Player audio setting in Win'7 Volume Control

[Guest]

OS is Win'7, up to date.  Flash Player is 11.4.  Browsers Firefox 15.0.1, Chrome 22, IE 9.  When playing a video on a website, the Flash Player volume setting in Volume Control (Windows Mixer) is set to the maximum, same as my speaker volume.  How can I permanently set Flash Player's volume to a setting lower than that of my speakers?

[jeromiec83223024]

This is a known issue in Firefox and Flash Player 11.3 or higher, but our testing (and I just personally re-tested it on my Win7 machine to double-check) indicates that this works as expected in Chrome and Internet Explorer.

There's a public bug tracking the Firefox issue here, and we have a corresponding internal bug assigned to an engineer for investigation:

https://bugbase.adobe.com/#bug=3210602

1.) Use Chrome or Internet Explorer with the latest Flash Player from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

2.) Revert to the most recent version of Flash Player 10.3 (Currently 10.3.183.25), which you can download here:

     http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

     Before reverting, you'll need to uninstall the current version of Flash Player first:

     http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html

If you *are* having the same problems with Chrome or MSIE, can you give me a clear, step-by-step description of how to reproduce the issue?  It's possible that we're doing something differently, or there's another component like audio drivers in-play.

Thanks!

[Guest]

Thank you.  You are correct.  With Chrome and IE the volume settings (in the Win'7 Volume Mixer) stay the way I adjusted them.  It's only with Firefox that the setting deverts to maximum.  I'll bear with the annoyance in Firefox until a solution is found (hopefully with the next version of Flash Player?). 

[MrX1980]

Hello

disabling "Protected Mode" should solve it.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1018071  -> Last Resort

[Guest]

This still isn't fixed in 11.8.

[jeromiec83223024]

We definitely shipped a patch for Firefox a couple of maintenance releases back that addressed this.  

Can you give me a specific description of the configuration and steps you're taking that demonstrate the problem?

[Guest]

I'll do you one better and upload a video without any cuts or edits (other than black bars on personally identifying info).  Configuration is in the description of the video, but I'll also upload a dxdiag file just in case.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D77fPmMwGdY

DxDiag.txt (60 KB)

https://mega.co.nz/#!VgAWUD6Y!SjrifEC4Wf-mCOMnL06LviYvL5JLG44doibmzCjVzbg

Also shown is an example of another program (in this case Mozilla, but all other apps behave accordingly) saving the volume mixer setting in between sessions.

Troubleshooting steps I've tried:

• Using the uninstaller and following the instructions on this page: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html, and trying out 11.7, 11.8 beta, and now 11.8 release.
• Deleting the registry key that holds all the volume mixer settings (this reset all of my saved volume settings as expected, except for Flash, which started out at 0 instead of 50)
• Enabling protected mode (this "fixes" the issue, but only because volume control is handled by Firefox, which has no problem saving volume between sessions), but this isn't really a fix because it caused crashes with twitch.tv and also leaves my computer more vulnerable to flash exploits. 

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks, this is helpful.  I'm seeing it on my machine as well. 

This is one of those things that seems super simple but is actually spectacularly difficult because of how sandboxing and various security restrictions come together in Windows.  We were able to ship a fix after a couple months of working with Microsoft support, but it looks like we've broken it again.

I need to go back now and track down which build it broke in.  I'll follow up with a new bug number in a bit.

[Guest]

Glad you could reproduce it on your end.  I understand it's very complicated, and granted I don't anything about the issue other than what you've told me here, but maybe you could save the volume mixer setting in a constant registry entry that the sandboxed flash container could refer to?  Anyway, if possible could you update me with the status of this as it progresses?  Thanks for actually looking into this. 

[jeromiec83223024]

The big change is that we run as much of Flash Player as possible as a low integrity process (aka. sandboxing).

This is an oversimplification, but in this architecture, if you encounter malicious content that manages to hijack Flash, it doesn't really have permission to do anything (including set this volume state) that would be useful in compromising your system. 

Since we've already figured out how to make this work, I'm hoping that this is just a simple bug.  We've been doing a lot of work in the audio/video pipeline lately.  Identifying the correct approach was the hard part, and I doubt that it has been somehow rendered invalid.

Once we have a candidate fix, it will be made available in the Beta channel.  Just keep an eye out for the bug number (TBD) in the weekly announcements.

[Guest]

Will do.