Cannot hear BBC streaming radio - realplayer/mplayer problem

I have been on the phone for hours trying to help my brother use his new Acer Aspire One to "listen live" to radio on the BBC iPlater website.

It is streaming audio in RealPlayer format, although the Acer is using MPlayer. The web page comes up perfectly, with all the right buttons, but when you press 'Play', nothing happens. No "buffering", no audio. He has right-clicked and checked that it is set to play real player files.

Does anyone know how to get it working?

Thanks!

 

Both the wma + real streams on the main BBC site and the real stream on the iplayer site work fine here. However, my copy of mplayer is self compiled from svn (the developmental tree), YMMV. The problem could be that the stock Fedora 8 mplayer is too old or not compiled with the live555 library. You can try Helix player to see if it works better.

 

Hmmm... I've never used Linux before - I'm just helping my brother over the phone.

I've been reading up, and I'm sure I can follow instructions from the web and install new software for him, but I have 2 questions about that:
1) For maximum simplicity (my brother is not good with computers and wants things to 'just work'), should I update M-Player, install Real Player or install this "Helix Player" that you mention?
2) Having done this, will it screw up the Acer automatic updates? (Remember, my brother just wants things to work with the simple menu system - he doesn't want to be doing Linux maintenance!).

Thanks!

 

Click link below
http://www.real.com/realcom/R?href=...yer/download.html?f=unix/RealPlayer11GOLD.rpm
window pops up click open with software installer.
bbc site should now work you may have to restart machine.

 

Either follow Rustybolts suggestion and install Realplayer or install Helix Player from Pirut (the package manager, Helix is in the Fedora repository). Helix player is the Open Source version of Realplayer.

 

Thanks guys! My brother has the basic Acer Inspire One Linux install - none of the advanced mode stuff has been activated. Will Rustybolts' link provide a relatively simple installer?

 

Yes.

 

Sorry, just to check one last time before we go through with it...


If we install Real Player, which presumably will replace MPlayer, we're not going to get error messages from the Acer's automatic update system next time it tries to update MPlayer, are we? I just want to make sure we're not solving one problem and creating another down the road!

Thanks

 

No, installing the Realplayer rpm does not really get rid of the mplayer package. Even if you uninstall mplayer with:

Code:

rpm -e mplayer

or through the package manager, it will not affect the update because the update function will only update the installed packages in the rpm database.

 

Thanks! Just to ask one more stupid question: next time he goes to the BBC website and tries to 'listen live', how will it know to use Real Player rather than MPlayer? Is there an option in the Real Player settings to make it the default?

 

The plugin or program to use is defined in firefox. Go to "Edit"-> "Preferences"-> "Applications" and search for "real". However, most likely it is already set as the default- I can't confirm this since I don't have either real or helix installed.

 

Once realplayer is installed it automatically becomes default.

 

Hi everyone - thanks for all the help! I'm going to talk my brother through it this evening.

One more thing: although youtube seems fine, BBC iPlayer (which also uses Flash) is choppy and keeps stopping to buffer - something which does not happen on his Windows PC, so it's not the connection speed. Is it possible that his flash player needs to be updated or replaced? Again, it would only be worth doing if it definitely did not cause issues later (for example, the Acer automatic updates getting confused). Thanks!

 

Very smooth here. However, I am using Flash 10 and a recent copy of mplayer from the developmental tree. I don't use Realplayer.

I downloaded it from the Abode site and installed it manually. Since it is not in the rpm database- there is no conflict.

 

I'm talking about a conflict with Acer's own updater - the one that has a big icon on their easy menu system. My brother is not going to have advanced mode activated, or right click, and he doesn't know what a terminal is so I just want to make sure that Acer's idiot-proof system won't be compromised if I go in and start installing things like this for him.

Can anyone give some simple instructions on installing the latest version of Flash? I've done a bit of googling and it all looks far too complicated to talk him through on the phone

 

It won't hose the update system, but the manually installed flashplayer will be over written if there is an update. I actually have my firefox 3 manually installed to /opt and symlinked all the common plugins from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /opt/firefox/plugins. I then manually install flashplayer to /opt/firefox/plugins. This way the rpm db is consistent and nothing will get hosed.

Very easy, after unpacking the tar.gz archive, either run the installer script as root (or via sudo) or just copy libflashplayer.so to the plugins directory.

 

Well that's good to know. I guess we can go ahead and install it, and if it gets overwritten by Acer's own update, that will probably be to the latest version anyway.

My brain is throbbing! I'm afraid I lost you at "symlinked". My total knowledge of Linux is what I've googled in my efforts to help my brother. I'm doing it over the phone, so I've ever never even actually used it!

Hmm... I'm guessing this all involves activating the advanced mode...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link

If you really want to learn the cli (commandline interface), here is one of the best tutorials:

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Using the tar.gz file is just my preference. There is also a rpm package and yum source on the flashplayer download page.

 

Thanks - but I'm not really planning to learn this stuff long term. I'm just trying to help my brother get his netbook set up so it does all the things he wants (like watching BBC video). I advised him to get the Linux version because I thought that, although unfamiliarity might make initial setup a bit harder, once everything is up and running it should stay that way, rather than gradually losing performance like his Windows laptop!

Assuming that the Real Player fix above works (I'll be checking in with him later), hopefully the only thing left to do will be to get a new version of Flash so that BBC iPlayer runs without stuttering. I was hoping that, as with the Linux fix above, there might be a link that loads up a simple installer, without having to manually move any files about or fire up the terminal (things that I might struggle through with the laptop in front of me, but I have no hope of explaining to my ultra-noob brother over the phone!).

 

Go to "Edit"-> "Preferences"-> "Application" in firefox and change it to "use software installer". Now go to the flashplayer page and choose the rpm package. It should bring up the software installer.

Linux these days is actually all setup to go. Unfortunately Linpus gives people a bad taste.