AUTHOR: Ken Moffat DATE: 2005-08-03 LICENSE: MIT License SYNOPSIS: playing realplayer audio on LFS-6.1. DESCRIPTION: On a clear day, with the wind in the right direction, you can do it. On a bad day it can be akin to disputing the airspeed velocity of swallows. PREREQUISITES: i586, i686, or ppc. HINT: Realplayer is binary, and therefore undesirable. OTOH, the BBC provide realplayer audio feeds, and so do Bad Dog Blues. Depending on what you want to listen to, it may be useful. As always, running binary software means you can't tell what it will really do. Find the realplay-10.0.5.756-linux-2.2-libc-gcc32-{i586,powerpc}.bin In theory, this is the current RealPlay-10.0.5-GOLD release, but to confirm what I'm downloading I find it easier to go to https://helixcommunity.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=154 (you'll need to go down to the RealPlayer for Unix part of the page). Earlier versions had a number of vulnerabilities in the (open) helix part of the code. You'll need libstdc++ from gcc-3.3 (follow BLFS for installing gcc-3.3.4 or use gcc-3.3.5 with suitable modifications. You'll also need pango, gtk2 and glib2, X11, expat, freetype and fontconfig. And mozilla or freetype as host for the plugins. If you want to run this from x86_64, you'll need 32-bit versions of all of these, so plan your installation carefully to make sure no 32-bit programs overwrite 64-bit versions. Make a note of where the plugins directory can be found (the BLFS method of installing in /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.x/ means the installer can't find it, but it finds /usr/lib/firefox/ ). Take your life in your hands, hold onto everything that you hold sacred, and run the binary installer. If running as root, /opt/RealPlayer seems a good place to put it, and symlink the plugin from /usr. Installing only for the current user is an alternative. After the installer has completed, run 'realplay' as the user who installed it - you should get the control window, and from the help check for upgrades: this should fire up the browser, take you to a helix site, and tell you it is up to date. At this point you need to make sure other sound applications work - trying to debug when your amplifier is set to a different source is not very easy :) For preference, avoid anything using arts (that includes kmix!). As a normal user, try to play a realplayer station, e.g. one of the BBC radio stations. The first time, it may work better if you click on the BBC's "play with stand-alone realplayer" link instead of using their funny pop-up player. If it works, count yourself very lucky! More likely, it will appear to play (often there is an initial delay while the station is contacted) but be silent (with the volume slider at the left and ineffective, or the volume boxes in the BBC player greyed-out). For non-BBC stations, you may have to tell the browser to open with /usr/bin/realplay (if the installer symlinked it from there). If it is silent, try killing artsd if that is running. Sometimes, logging out and then logging in is the key. Basically, the process seems random - sometimes it works first time, other times not. Investigation of a silent system shows udev has not created /dev/adsp and /dev/dsp, but that is just an indication of a problem elsewhere. To be fair, I mainly use kmix as my desktop volume control, so arts could be the main cause of my difficulties. Strangely, once you have it working, it should be fine for the rest of that session. I have no idea if it works on video feeds - last time I tried (with firefox-1.0.5 which had broken the plugin API) a BBC video clip crashed my X server (and left something running that continued to crash it - I have graphical logins). Now, I can't find any real clips on the BBC website. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: CHANGELOG: 2005-08-03 First public version. Updated versions of this hint may be found at http://www.kenmoffat.uklinux.net/hints/