On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Stephen Walton wrote: > Well, notwithstanding the recent flame war, I really want to be able to > listen to NPR on Fedora. > > The situtation right now: I've installed the Helix Player, both by hand > (unpack archive into /usr/local and make a symbolic link > /usr/local/bin/hxplay -> /usr/local/HelixPlayer/hxplay) and using Thomas > Chung's instructions at fedoranews.org. Either way I get an error box > "Unexpected error code (0x800400C9)" every time I try to play a Real > stream. This is on two quite different pieces of hardware. > > Has anyone been able to get HelixPlayer working on FC1? Haven't tried. Apropos the previous discussion, here's a case where some non-FOSS solution is required, but Helix isn't the only choice. I installed FOSS gxine from fedora.freshrpms.net and the non-FOSS Windows codecs from www.mplayerhq.hu. Then I set gxine to be the default application for handling Real and MediaPlayer files. So far, everything seems to work, including NPR. A side effect is that I don't have the problems that some RealPlayer/Helix users have complained about with registration, phoning home, etc. Would I like to world to use open standards for streaming so I could have an end-to-end FOSS solution? Sure. But they don't. I can (and occasionally do) suggest to NPR that they offer open streaming formats, but I can't force them to. -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
