Realplayer again

[Mark Greenwood]

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 18:06:57 Lisi Reisz wrote:
> I have downloaded and installed first the realplayer available in medibuntu 
> (Realplayer 11).  iPlayer continued to say that it needed Realplayer in both 
> Furefox and Konqueror.  So I clicked thro' to the site offered by the BBC and 
> downloaded and installed from there (Realplayer 11 GOLD deb).  Still no joy.  
> So I asked Mozilla for an add-on for Firefox.  Guess what?  It lead me to the 
> same Realplayer Gold site.  I did not install it a third time.
> 
> I am at my wits end.   How do I persuade both Firefox and the BBC that 
> Realplayer is installed?
> 
> TIA
> Lisi
> 
> PS This troublesome computer will go back to its owner in teh nex day or two 
> and things will settle down until teh next time.  But all this stuff was 
> working before the update....
> 
As far as I understand it, the Medibuntu RealPlayer won't work with the BBC site because it doesn't contain the closed-source Real codec used by Real for streaming.
I've never bothered with RealPlayer anyway. I use mozilla-mplayer, which streams RealPlayer 9 and WMA audio - both of which seem to work with the BBC site (you need to be patient with it though, it does a lot of buffering before it starts playing).

Also, you need to be careful with the order in which you install plugins - Firefox will use the first available one so as you installed the non-working Medibuntu one first, it'll keep trying to use that one until you uninstall it. I'd remove all flavours of RealPlayer, then install mozilla-mplayer.

It'd would have been nice if the BBC had carried on with the old ogg vorbis streams they used to have... but we can dream... :)

Mark