RealPlayer, frozen and frustration

[<mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

A day or two ago I took the plunge and upgraded to frozen. A few small
glitches, but they were easily dealt with and mostly I was very
pleased by how smooth and how straightforward the upgrade process
was. Thanks and praise to the developers.

I have one problem however.

I had three versions of RealPlayer on my slink system---RealPlayer 7,
RealPlayer G2 and RealPlayer 5.0. I had the three versions because
there are certain sites that I visit regularly whose archived files
always produce an error when I atttempt to listen to them with more
recent versions of Real Player than 5.0 (the error-message is `Invalid
Metafile'; the real.com site contains the helpful information that
this is not a common error-message). So for those files. I would use
version 5. (All of these versions were installed by hand in
/usr/local.)

Now that I've upgraded to frozen, though, rvplayer5.0 always produces
a segmentation fault; G2 has expired; and the performance I get with
RealPlayer 7 (on the files that it will accept) is not great (it
doesn't seem to handle buffering very well). 

This doesn't feel like progress. What I would like most is to be able
to run the old version (5.0) in frozen. Does anyone know of a way to
solve the seg-fault problem? Or any insight into the `Invalid
Metafile' problem?

Thanks very much,

Jim