Firefox and Google Hangouts (and apulse?)

[depontius]

From what I understand, Firefox doesn't support Alsa any more, preferring to work through pulseaudio. I struggle to keep any and all L.P. ware off of my machines, and am pleased that apparently someone at Gentoo has kept Firefox working with Alsa, after some fashion.

However the other day we tried to do a Google hangouts with our daughter's family, for the first time in some months, possibly or probably the first time since Firefox changed it's Alsa support. We had no sound. Moreover, when I tried "settings" I couldn't find the microphone, which is really odd, since there is as usual an audio input channel on the motherboard sound support. But clearly there was no way to select the microphone built into the USB video camera.

For a quick test, against the next Hangout with our daughter and her family, I just fired up Google Chrome, and it just worked, didn't even have to find or fiddle with settings.

However most of the time we use Firefox. I know that apulse helps in situations like this, and looking at the apulse site it appears that this ought to be possible. I'm wondering if anyone is doing this already and would be willing to share their formula. Basically I'd like sound to come out through the motherboard's hd_audio and use the microphone from the USB camera.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth