Playing streaming NPR?

[Gary W. Swearingen]

mrwolff <mrwolff at bigred.unl.edu> writes:

> I'm using mplayer with the media connectivity extension on Breezy.  I mean it plays, but it just doesn't do it well at
> all...  There is a two minute lag then the player itself turns black and looks like it has frozen for a while and then
> eventually it plays.  I'm on broadband so the ISP speed isn't the factor.... hmmm..

That sounds an awful lot like my experiences with realplayer on
debian, ubuntu, kubuntu, and mandriva.  Long "black" period, then it
runs VERY poorly, with the menus VERY slow to respond.  I thought I'd
give my ISP a rest before trying it again with a non-amd64 OS, before
giving up and returning to BSD land, where the Linux realplayer worked
well (but still after a suprisingly long "black" period with some
streamers).

And your "black" comment even sounds like your mplayer is somehow
using the realplayer.  Know anything about that?

I haven't tried mplayer, as I'm uncertain of the legality of the
"real" decoder.

Are you running an amd64 OS?  Did you notice that the stream throttled
down to the minumum available (maybe not, with an audio-only stream)?