jaunty: no BBC sound

[Mark Greenwood]

On Monday 04 May 2009 20:17:36 Sascha Güthling wrote:
> 
> 64bit Kubuntu here doesn't work either. I had helix-player installed
> together with mozilla-helix-player. It didn't work. 

Helix Player is the open-source version of RealPlayer. As it is open source it does not support the recent proprietary Real codecs because Real want to protect their IP. The BBC use the recent codecs. Hence HelixPlayer won't work. IMO, Real only pay lip-service to the idea of open source, and HelixPlayer isn't very useful.

> Mozilla-mplayer
> wants to install 26 other packages as dependencies!?! Why???

Because the plugin requires the player. The plugin doesn't do anything except pipe a stream into mplayer. It's an efficient re-use of code resulting in a neater installation. (Although it doesn't really need to bring in the mplayer GUI, I'll grant you that one. But you could remove it if you wanted to. Give the poor packagers a break, it's a tough job.. ;) ).

> I only
> want the plugin, not the whole player. I refuse!

Calm down :) The plugin on its own is useless, it needs the player as well.

FWIW, the link in Doc's original email plays for me, on 64-bit Jaunty, using the mozilla-mplayer plugin. I also have w64codecs from medibuntu, you will probably need these too.

If it's not working for you, you'll need to try typing about:plugins into Firefox and see if any other plugin has registered itself for Real or WMA streams, and remove it. I have not yet found a website that doesn't work with the combination of Flash and mplayer.

Cheers,

Mark

> 
> Cheers
> Sascha
>