04.13
I recently needed to install RealPlayer and the RealPlayer mozilla firefox plugin so that I could listen to Adam & Joe’s show on BBC 6 Music.
I had previously been using the mplayer mozilla plugin, and although playback worked, it was quite choppy (it didn’t seem to buffer too well), and I could not pause/resume or seek.
My first thought was to look in the Medibuntu repositories, and sure enough, there was a realplayer package – unfortunately it seems that this did not include the mozilla plugin.
My next try was to look at the RealPlayer for linux website, but it only has a download for the 32-bit version. I did notice that there was a link to helix player for other platforms. Helix player is an open source media player on which RealPlayer is based. I tried helix player, but this can not play back proprietary codecs (and therefore not the real stream from the BBC website), however it did include a mozilla plugin!
I tried a combination of both – I installed RealPlayer from the Medibuntu repositories, and installed the mozilla plugin from the helix tarball to my home directory. And it works!
Instructions follow:
- Enable the Medibuntu repositories.
- Install the RealPlayer and libstdc++5 packages:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install realplayer libstdc++5 - Load RealPlayer (Applications > Sound & Video > RealPlayer), and in Tools > Preferences, select the hardware tab, and set the audio driver to
OSS. Press OK, and close RealPlayer. - Download and unpack (into a temporary location) the Helix Player for AMD64 – I grabbed the
linux-2.6-glibc23-amd64tar. - Copy the contents of the “
mozilla” folder to~/.mozilla/plugins(in your home directory – you may need to create the plugins folder).
Update: Looks as if I may have jumped the gun a bit – looking at the files installed by the medibuntu realplayer package, it does indeed look as if it comes with the mozilla plugin. I do not know why it wasn’t working for me (maybe it places it in the wrong location?) – but I am running fine with the above solution (even if it is a bit messy).
If the medibuntu realplayer package comes with a mozilla plugin, where is it? And how do I get it to work.
It’s annoying that they still haven’t got this sorted.
Cheers for any help,
James
Well, according to synaptic, the medibuntu realplayer package for jaunty has installed the files:
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/nphelix.so/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/nphelix.xpt
Haven’t been able to work out why they aren’t picked up by firefox. I also noticed that the nphelix.so provided by the package is 39.6KB, whilst the version from the tarball is 76.1KB. Also libstdc++5 has to be installed for the method in the post to work (when manually placing the helix plugin files in to the mozilla plugins folder in your home directory).