Re: About realplayer

[Carl Johnson <carlj@peak.org>]

Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu> writes:

> Mario Filipe wrote:
> 
>   |> I installed rvplayer on my machine (slink updated this morning)
>   |> but everytime i try to run welcome.rm (provided with realplayer
>   |> package) it tell's me this:
>   |> 
>   |> File compression not supported. Cannot locate the requested
>   |> RealAudio decoder.
>   |> 
>   |> For more information, please see Error 38 at:
>   |>         http://www.realaudio.com/help/error
>   |> 
>   |>         I checked error 38 but it only mentions windows. I've
>   |> strace'd the
>   |> thing but it find's everyfile it tryes to open, except
>   |> pnconfig.cfg! 
> 
> This seems to be the error message that rvplayer gives in response to
> just about every difficulty---very unhelpful.
> 
> When I had this problem (or at least a problem that resulted in the
> same error-message), it turned out to be because rvplayer couldn't
> find the relevant libraries where it itself had installed them.
> 
> What I did was to figure out which shared libraries the program
> depended on (using the ldd command). I saw that it knew how to find
> those libraries, and that they were in /usr/lib. When I made symbolic
> links from /usr/lib/libra* to the various libraries that rvplayer had
> itself installed in /usr/local/rvplayer5.0/, everything worked (well
> ... after I changed the permissions on /dev/dsp, everything worked).

I had similar problems when I installed it, and I spent quite a while
figuring the problem out.  I finally concluded the the major problem
is their insistance on calling them "shared library" files.  That
implies that they are the same as the system shared library files, but
it appears the program doesn't get them from the operating system, so
you MUST tell the program exactly where they are located.

The program never worked well even after I got that fixed, so I ended
up removing it later.
-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj@peak.org