No sound from mplayer or realplayer when playing audiio streams
 

Hi all,

Ever since logging in this evening I've had the following sound issues:

-on trying to open a BBC stream from Firefox, got the message: 'Could not find an appropriate hxplay or realplay in the system path to use as an embedded player'. Did 'about:plugins' in Firefox which showed that 'Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible' is installed.

-saved the bbc .ram file and tried to open it with RealPlayer. The buffer loads and the timer starts running, so I presume its processing the stream, but no sound. In the past the radio 4 stream would just automatically open in standalone RealPlayer

-tried running mplayer to play some other radio streams from the command line with an alias command like I usually do. But again no sound, though mplayer appears to be processing the stream as it fires up normally and the timer, cache indicator etc are active.

-tried to play the saved .ram file with Amarok, but got the message 'There is no available decoder'

-with mp3 playback on Amarok sound output is fine.

The KDE kicker bar disappeared as well. Fixed that but no idea why any of this is happening...

Help much appreciated

Have you tried VLC ?

David

Libraries?
 

Hi David,

Thanks for the tip. It worked a treat - I installed vlc and now mplayer and realplayer work fine! Is it because all three share the libraries that came with vlc?

libdc1394-13
libdvbpsi4
libdvdnav4
libgsm1
libtar
libwxgtk2.6-0
libxosd2

Really curious as to why it stopped in the first place, and which libraries are reponsible so I can uninstall vlc and keep what I need.

Gilbert

I don't know about how an uninstall would work, it's not a large program, disk space wise. They do pack every codec under the sun in though, so you have the best chance of whatever media you are hoping to play, actually play.

The others do probably do use the libs that vlc had the courage to include.

Good luck....

David

Problem solved
 

Hey bud,

Thanks for replying.

The problem resurfaced. Found out eventually that the KDE sound server system was hogging audio resources and had to be turned off from system preferences.

Viva Linux!