Playing streaming NPR?

[Henk Koster]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:52:32 -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:

> 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).
<snip> 
> 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)?

My experience as well, running 32-bit k7-smp kernel. For example,
rtsp://media.cbc.ca/clips/national/thenational.rm starts at 200+kbps,
then quickly throttles down to something like 59kbps, and a little later 
to 20kbps, at which point it becomes unplayable. This happens when 
playing in gxine, mplayer or totem, and of course in realplayer itself.
The slow (SLOW) reaction of buttons in realplayer is really annoying.
I think that it is either amd- or smp-related, as the same software 
plays fine on my laptop with 686-kernel.