When I try to access the BBC video streams via Firefox (or Mozilla/Epiphany etc), the clip buffers and delivers perfect sound- but the video plays for a few seconds, freezes, plays for a few seconds, freezes ad infinitum.

This happens on every distro. I currently use Debian Sarge, Ubuntu Breezy and SuSe 9.3 - but the same issue has been apparent in Mandrake 10 and Fedora Core 3 & 4 on this machine. I note that when another application is running which hijacks the sound, RealPlayer delivers silent but flawlessly flowing video clips. Interestingly the low quality setting for dialup gets round this: but I have a 2mbps broadband which I'd rather like to use! Theres no issue with my adsl because everything else flies seamlessly.

I've tried both with and without alsa-oss. The only impact this has is that on oss, the "buffering" remains at 0: the video still freezes repeatedly while sound is fine.
The Mplayer alternative solution works absolutely flawlessly if you select Windows Media player on the BBC news player: but the only part of the BBC site where I can use this is the news player: I really want realplay to work because its the only way of listening to BBC radio and I want to watch other video clips apart from BBC news!!

I've searched and googled and although I've found plenty of problems with sound and getting realplay to run, nothing that quite matches the above. Any ideas? I'd really appreciate a solution to this: it's now the biggest irritant on my system by far....

I know I got no response to this but in case anyone is interested here's an odity. I have finally installed a distro in which Real Player 10 works perfectly: SuSe 10. The issue with the others is that Real seems unable to deliver both sound and vision without picture freezing and laggy command response behaviour which makes browsers also freeze intermittently while real is running as a plugin. But on SuSe 10 it all works flawlessly.

But I have not the faintest idea why.. I have tried local installs of the latest versions of RP and Firefox on both SuSe 10 and Kubuntu Breezy in the home directories. Flawless realplay performance on SuSe, usual freezing on Kubuntu. WTF?????

BTW this behaviour is the same on both the 32 and 64 bit versions: SuSE 10 fine, Kubuntu (and everything else including SuSe 9.3) useless......

I just saw this post and wondered if you could give me some advice about Real Player (I have Ubuntu installed). I only want it so that I can stream BBC radio broadcasts and have installed as per the best instructions I could find but when I go to the BBC website and try to play something live I get the BBC radio player window but it just doesn't stream anything. Do you have any suggestions?

tdean

If realplayer is working ok except for BBC radio check for these codecs; cook.so , cook.so.6.0
They are included in the w32 'all' codecs but not in the 'essentials' codecs if I remember right. A lot of BBC radio broadcasts need one of these codecs.
Hope this helps. BBC has some great programs.

I have had no problems getting BBC radio to work after a fashion in Firefox on all distros providing w32 codecs are installed: I say "after a fashion" because sound is a bit choppy and it causes the browser to become non-responsive - so I've tended to use a mozilla clone like Epiphany to listen to the radio while browsing in Firefox or Opera.

But in SuSe 10 everything works perfectly: I can listen to streaming BBC audio on RealPlayer while browsing: all in Firefox. I can also watch BBC video with pefect sound and no freezing. And I now get the same results in Ubuntu : but only by copying the RealPlayer directory and plugins from my SuSe 10 installation and updating links as appropriate.

tdean

Please disregard my previous post. I'm streaming BBC with xine, not realplayer. Not sure what I was thinking. Could alcohol have been a factor ?

I also have this problem, using the gxine plugin. I had many many problems getting to where I am now, namely mplayer would just not work, also I had issues with using x86_64 software - it cant use the 32bit codecs. Got around that part by installing 32 bit Firefox and 32 bit xine / gxine.

But I get this problem of it being choppy. Did you ever find the answer? I feel slightly cheated that I can do everything else fine in Linux, except watch BBC video and see websites with anything in Flash 8 upwards.