Saturday, July 09, 2005

Linux, Firefox, and rtsp Revisited

Without a doubt, the most-accessed entry in this blog is one I did on getting the rtsp aka RealPlayer protocol to work with Firefox. Don't believe me? Go to Google, enter "firefox rtsp" in the search bar, and then hit "I'm feeling lucky."

Anyway, as a result of feedback I requested on that post, I've got some new information. You don't have to edit configuration files buried three levels deep to fix this. No, you just have to do a little bit of mouse clicking to change the configuration file from your browser. This post describes the procedure for Mozilla, but the same trick works in Firefox, to wit:

  1. In the address bar of your browser type the string
    about:config
    and hit return. You'll get a long confusing list of options. Some are in bold, some aren't, but don't worry about that.
  2. Right-click anywhere in the display area. A box will appear. Click on the New option.
  3. Another box will appear. In it, type
    network.protocol-handler.app.rtsp
  4. Yet another box will appear. In it, type
    /usr/bin/realplay
    or the location of whichever program you want to work.

That's it, RealPlayer should now work. You can check your work here.

Windows Users! I note that some of you have been searching for a solution to this problem as well. The problem seems to be in RealPlayer, not Firefox. If you go to Word_Whore, scroll past the politics, and look at the bottom of the post, you'll see that you should enable Real-Time Streaming Protocol by clicking on "Preferences=>Advanced=>Other Media" in RealPlayer and enable RTSP.

Hope this works, I haven't tried it myself on a Windows machine.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

For windows users who want to use something other than Realplayer you need to edit the registry to point the rtsp to the correct app. My export reg file looked like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rtsp]
@="URL: RealTime Streaming Protocol"
"URL Protocol"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rtsp\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\system32\\url.dll,0"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rtsp\shell]
@="open"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rtsp\shell\open]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\rtsp\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Media Player Classic\\mplayerc.exe\" \"%1\""


for Media Player Classic.

Hiope this helps.

rcjhawk said...

Thanks for the information.

For some reason, "editing the registry" frightens me more than "editing a configuration file," but I guess it amounts to the same thing.

James Coleman said...

Silly computers.

No need to edit registry.
I had same problem windows Firefox and IE. Realplayer (or Quicktime) install doesn't register itself for rtsp (by default). I noticed at install time for Quicktime you could select media types and rtsp was on the list unselected. How-so-ever though, this worked for me:

1. in Realplayer (version 10.5)
Tools ->
Preferences ->
Content ->
Media Types ->
Manually Configure Media Types ... -> [Select...]
scroll to Other Types and select Real-Time Streaming Protocol

2. Click on rtsp:// url in browser. Confirm to browser to allow realplayer to do rtsp.

3. Do a little celebration dance.

Note: I didn't need to restart firefox.


Actually I left out the _REAL_ step 1. I took but hopefully if you read this you can somewhat bypass most of this step?:

1. Lookup internet. Apply about:config changes, try realplayer by itself. Download Quicktime. Doesn't play video very well? Get confused. Watch video in realplayer (standalone) - sound okay but video streaming bad. Find where to configure rtsp media in realplayer preferences. YAYish.

rcjhawk said...

You know, this is silly. You'd think by now that the Mozilla folks would figure out that people occasionally click on links that don't start with http://, and set up the browser to ask "what the heck do you want to do here?" just like it does for files with weird extensions (except, of course, for PDF files).

Any Firefox developers care to comment? (Admit it, you came here because you're couldn't figure out the rtsp thing either.)