The VideoLAN Forums

First, a big thank you to VLC because it is the only player that
will play youtube audio on my system. On other players,
including my two browsers (Firefox and Chrome) the audio is all
static. If I download the youtube file or paste the URL into
VLC, it plays perfectly. Here is a brief history of the problem:

On my Dell Inspiron 530 with XP Pro and 4 G of RAM, the on-board
sound (Realtek) worked well for two years and then started to
get some static, and then died. All audio was static incuding
all computer sounds. Installed Service Pack 3 to get all updates
and run some diagnostics which could not detect any problems.
Installed hundreds of MB's of updates which did not help. Next,
Installed Rocketfish 5.1 sound card and got back computer sounds
(wav files), dvd audio, and MP3 audio. But, all FLV files
incuding youtube audio, and all WMA files are still mostly
static. Tried another Rocketfish card with no change. Removed
Realtek drivers, disabled Realtek in BIOS, etc. Unintalled and
Reinstalled Rocketfish, etc. Spoke with Rocketfish support.
Tried K-Lite Codecs and another codecs pack. Nothing helped.
Next, I upgraded to Creative Sound Blaster Titanium with
hundreds of MB of code and still have the same problem. I then
installed the CCCP player because they said that they could play
any media file. Nope, still had the same problem. I then spent a
few hours with the CCCP troubleshoot with no success. Here is a
link to my Insurgent log file
<http://cccp.project357.com/p/f2dd110d8> Then, I installed VLC
1.1.10 and success! But, I still cannot get youtube audio from a
browser. Any ideas besides a clean windows install? Thanks in
advance for any comments.

You could test the audio on some live linux disc/USB-stick before you do clean install of Windows. That way you could check if the issue is hardware or software related.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am not familiar with a usb stick or live linux disc
or how to test audio using them. But, I will do search and try to figure them out.

Burn e.g. Ubuntu to CD and boot from it. Then playback MP3 files with default media player.

Thanks VLC -- That sounds doable.