AUTHOR: Ken Moffat DATE: 2006-08-14 LICENSE: MIT License SYNOPSIS: playing realplayer audio on LFS-6.1 or later. 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 - the main problems are devices (even with modules, should be easy if you follow the LFS book) and the sometimes baleful influence of kde. PREREQUISITES: i586, i686, x86_64 multilib, or ppc (possibly, sparc) with LFS-6.1 or later, or CLFS 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. 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. Do not be surprised that the i586 version is up to 10.0.7 but that the powerpc version is only 10.0.5- the latest vulnerability in this packages was related to flash, which does not work on ppc. Video feeds (e.g. from the BBC) sometimes work on x86 and x86_64 (multilib), but not reliably (the problems seems to be inadequate servers - I also see this occasionally for audio feeds). So far, I have never seen video work on ppc, it just forks some realplay.bin processes and takes an absurd amount of cpu and time. Actually, the ppc side seems very iffy, probably related to the network adaptors - any low-bitrate works on my G5, but a specific live rp feed seems to be set to high-bandwidth, and takes 97% cpu. On my ibook, sound is too poor to be desirable (the tiny speakers). This relies on OSS compatability in the kernel config so that it can use /dev/dsp. The LFS book has an example modprobe.conf to ensure snd_pcm_oss gets loaded with snd_pcm. You'll need libstdc++ from gcc-3.3 (follow BLFS for installing gcc-3.3.6. You'll also need pango, gtk2 and glib2, X11, expat, freetype and fontconfig, and mozilla or firefox 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. I assume you have already realised that you will want alsa-lib and alsa-utils as a foundation for all the sound infrastructure. Make a note of where the plugins directory can be found (the BLFS method of installing in /usr/lib/firefox-1.x.y/ means the installer can't find it, but it finds /usr/lib/firefox/ ). If something has created a /usr/lib/mozilla directory for plugins (e.g. librsvg), you should probably clean that up first, otherwise you won't get the option of specifying which directory to use. 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 (for ppc, it behaves differently and links to a realplayer site which is less than useful). 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!). Actually, if you use kde you should open kcontrol and within Sound & Multimedia -> SoundSystem on the General tab tell it to Auto-suspend if idle after 1 second. You will particularly need to set the Auto-Suspend if an idle system shows artsd running, and realplay complains that the sound device is already in use. 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. Otherwise, it may appear to play (after an initial delay while the station is contacted) but be silent (with the volume boxes in the BBC player greyed-out). Usually, it works ok in subsequent plays using the BBC player, but for some versions of gtk the BBC volume slider is always greyed out even when sound works. For non-BBC stations, you may have to tell the browser to open with /usr/bin/realplay (or wherever it is symlinked). Alternatively, if the browser reports that the required application is missing (e.g. for a .ram file) and tells you to edit your preferences, find the .ram file (in /tmp) and use File|Open then point it to /usr/bin/realplay (if mozilla-family browsers are set up to use a helper application which does not exist, they will not show it in the preferences dialog). KDE issues: This should all work with kde, but you might have to do some hefty reconfiguration first - on my builds, kde seems to think that amarok is the bee's knees and will play anything - that causes segfaults and disappointment. File associations are the key to this - in konqueror Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> File Associations under audio update vnd.rn-ralaudio and x-pn-realaudio, under video update vnd.rn-realvideo - for all of these, if realplay isn't listed as an option, browse to find it and add it, then move it up the list for each format so that it comes first, and finally apply (this should cause the configuration to be updated). if konqueror cannot find the mozilla plugins, under Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Plugins point it to the correct directory ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: CHANGELOG: 2005-08-03 First public version. 2005-08-08 Added comment about OSS compatability 2006-03-22 Add more detail for kde. 2006-03-30 Update rp version in the download comments. 2006-05-30 Update gcc version to match BLFS, some rewording, clarify kernel OSS requirements. 2006-06-06 Comment that video feeds don't work on ppc. 2006-08-14 Coment on cpu usage on ppc, and workaround for missing helper application. 2006-09-03 Clarified the comments on ppc. Updated versions of this hint may be found at http://www.kenmoffat.uklinux.net/hints/