RealPlayer

Awhile ago, I tried the Helix Player, an open source version of RealPlayer. I didn't have much success with it.

But now, RealPlayer 10 is out for Linux. It's not free, but it's not obnoxious like some versions of yore. So I decided to try it out. There's an RPM and everything, though for some reason the code goes in the /usr/local tree instead of /usr.

So far it works. I did have to tweak the plugins to get them to run in Firefox, though. The Mozilla Realplayer Plugins are in /usr/local/RealPlayer/mozilla. With my non-standard setup, the plugins didn't get into the Firefox plugin directory, so I did
$ cd /usr/local/firefox/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/local/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so .
$ ln -s /usr/local/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt .
This works pretty well. The CBS News site lets me play some content within the browser window. However, for some content it insists on launching Xine, which I use to play .wmv files, and then not playing the file. Even though I've set my preferences to RealPlayer.