Slashdot Mirror
Realplayer G2 for Linux
Skijk writes "Realplayer G2 is finally here for Linux. You can get it at Real Player. " The folks at RealNetworks are calling it an Alpha, but I've heard good reports on its' stability-how's it working for everyone?
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
that sucks big balls. sparc, alpha and ppc are all in really good shape, really solid ports. and yes, i know, the linux community (and esp the lovely /. community) are so x86 bigoted that they don't care.. "get some real hardware!" HAH. Motorolla and IBM PPC systems are fantastic boxen, as are the newest Sparc Stations.
After some fiddling, I got it to work w/o a
/usr/lib
.ram
hitch. I run Linux 2.3.3, with egcs (and it's
libstdc++), and glibc 2.1.1pre1. My system is
based on an old a.out Slackware install from 1995,
upgraded by hand to ELF and then to total glibc.
So it's a non-distribution really, nothing of
slackware left -- DIY (do it yourself distro).
It wants libstdc++ 2.8, so I went into
and made a link called that pointing to version
2.9 (egcs's version) -- Install worked, but
there was a unresolved symbol.
I downloaded RH 5.2's libstdc++ 2.8, installed that,
added the appropriate environment variable to
by bash config, and everything went peachy.
A few bugs I noted:
1) It forgets about the clip (the URL, the
file, whatever) immediately after playing it.
Pressing PLAY again says that the URL is out of
date, or some such.
2) The default audio volume is really low -- and
it resets it with every new clip loaded. So you
have to move the volume slider down and up again
to hear the audio portion.
3) You cant zoom the video in the window (i.e.
play at double size).
4) As a consequence of #1 (forgetting URLs), it
cant play the AudioNet/Broadcast.com style, where
it plays their 20 second plug, then forwards you
to the content you wanted.
5) RealPlayer doesnt come w/ a default, or demo
clip -- but the one suggested under Open Location
doesnt work (it says that you are missing some
components to play that one)
rtsp://g2home.real.com/install/welcome.smi
(err, that one...it starts buffering, resizes the
playback window, then pops up the error -- yes my
environment variable was set)
Other than that, it's fine. Speed and quality at
least as good as the previous versions (except
for the bugs. of course)
That being said, I'm not planning on installing Realplayer anyhow. The only non-free software I have on my computer is Netscape, and I've got a clear upgrade path for that, too. When something coredumps, I want to be able to fix it - and unfortunately, Realplayer and Netscape do that, sometimes more often than others - and I can't do that with proprietary software.
http://www.cnn.com/videoselect/
Feel free to download it, then test this page, report back your distribution and version, netscape version, and special tweaks to anything (plugin configuration), I would love to see the results..
Okay, as many of you seem frustrated and can't get it working in Netscape, here is the deal. Edit -> preferences -> navigator -> Applications. From here, find the real player item, open it, and tell it to use an application "realplay %s". The key thing here is the %s. I have no idea how to get the inline plugins working, if anyone knows, tell me.
XSwallow is a nifty little plugin that can be registered to handle all mimetypes and spawn off a helper app to handle the type, which netscape won't do for embedded mimetypes. The nifty bit is that xswallow can relocate the spawned off X program into the space that netscape provides in its window, so you get a nicely faked plugin especially for vrml and animations.
With xswallow you have two choices, when netscape finds an embedded realvideo type do you want the realplayer app to appear embedded in the webpage, or whether you want it to appear external to the webpage, which might be a better option as the actual app has menubars etc that wouldn't exist in a real plugin.
I used it quite happily for the previous rvplayer with a xswallow config line of ;Real Player
audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin; rpm; rvplayer %s;
C.
I sometimes write stuff
About an hour ago I downloaded an rpm. My system is pretty normal (AMD 350, 64meg, sb16, RH5.2, 2.2.1). I would consider myself a pretty heavy user of realaudio. This seems to be pretty good, as stuff like this goes. There are no plug-ins, and it still lacks many features, but it works well for what it dose. I tired watching CNN on it, which it did better then the old one. Although I have been only using this for a few hours, I would say for most users, this is an improvement. The README actually had some relevant info about what is not working & left out. Even some Esd info.
Oh, before I forget. This is using a good %18.1 of my memory on simple local clip. CPU usage is down, but memory is way up from the last version. This is not a product for those short on resources. Hope this helps.
However, the RealAudio formats are still proprietary. For a streaming format, that may be a little less of a concern than for a true archival format. Still, RealAudio files are being archived. Who will be able to read those files 20 years from now when Win95, NT4, and Linux 2.0 will be all dim memories? And why should users of other operating systems (FreeBSD? BeOS? AmigaOS? Plan9? future free OS software efforts?) be excluded from listening to on-line broadcasts?
Internet streaming audio could become an important way of distributing public service information, independent information, etc., and I think it should be open. I hope it will happen, one way or another.
As always: there are no versions for non-intel processors. When are these people going to see that there are other architectures? :-(((
Understanding is a three-edged sword. --Kosh