Real Player, WAS Re: Relicensing the AMR codec for inclusion in Ubuntu

[David Fox]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Steven Davies-Morris
<sdavmor at systemstheory.net> wrote:
> I still have problems on Hardy 8.04 AMD64 when I listen to the BBC 5
> Live Test Match Special realmedia mode feed in Helix. Also the

Not listening to that, but I just tried listening to bbc5 using the
default listen now - up popped the bbc media player and it started
playing radio 5 - ubuntu hardy 64 bit too, but I also have mplayer
plugins and both versions of codecs (w32 and w64 codecs) installed.

Whether it is possible to play bbc on a "naked" ubuntu (for instance,
intrepid ISO run inside a Virtualbox) remains to be seen. It should be
able to do this; in fact, Mepis was able to do that, I believe,
without any help, a few years ago -- which is one reason I made the
plunge from Mandriva and picked Mepis as a replacement, which in turn
led me to Debian (as I basically turned Mepis into Debian) and then
Ubuntu.


> Windows media mode feed, which is better but prone to abruptly cutting
> out and not auto-recovering. Though having said that, it's *much*

I see this happening, as a matter of fact. There doesn't seem to be a
definite reason for the stream to just "stop" but often it does.
Sometimes I will turn to a radio station and run it all night, only to
find that the stream stops in the middle of the night :(. Sometimes I
have to close Firefox completely and restart to get it to play the
content, but that's also true of video content (such as CNN and/or
Youtube, and other video content sites - I get black and/or blank
screens with nothing playing sometimes.)

nspluginwrapper is there of course, but it's an imperfect solution -
and one can see all sorts of garbage output[1] on the controlling
terminal from time to time - and I also think nspluginwrapper consumes
too much CPU. (right now, listening to bbc world service in a bbcradio
player window - nspluginwrapper is consuming 8% on average CPU,
according to top, whilst mplayer is consuming about 3%. Surely,
mplayer needs to do more work, one would think.

[1] this stuff, particularly

** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: NPN_GetURLNotify() invoke: Connection closed


>