ZoneO-tips for Mandriva Linux

How do I listen to BBC radio with Mandriva? I keep getting error messages about plugins, is there any way around it?

 
 

You can listen to BBC radio using the newest versions of RealPlayer. The problem is, most versions of Mandriva Linux do not include the proper version of RealPlayer.

First, a little background discussion. In 2003 Real Networks decided to open the platform of their player, RealPlayer, to the open source community. This was the start of the Helix project. Nowadays, Helix is the foundation for media players in mobile phones, the free RealPlayer, RealProducer, and the Helix Universal Server. Therefore, RealPlayer is now an extension of Helix Player.

In the basic version, Helix Player supports the following formats, Theora, Vorbis, Ogg, Basic SMIL 2.0, H263, RealPix, RAM and RPM playlist formats, RTSP streaming with RTP, HTTP streaming, RealText, RealEvents. RealPlayer adds support for RealAudio, RealVideo, mp3, mp4 audio (AAC unprotected only), and Flash 4.

Now, the tricks is that you can get the Helix Player to play mp3, or RealAudio. And we will use it now.

To do so, you'll need to have your sources configured with plf-free and plf-nonfree (see Install new software with Mandriva). Once you have done this, if you search for helix in the software installer (Figure 1), you should get the following packages

• helixplayer
• helixplayer-helix-codecs
• helixplayer-mozilla-plugin
• helixplayer-real-codecs

Now, what you want are helixplayer-real-codecs, helixplayer-mozilla-plugin, and helixplayer. So select helixplayer-real-codecs FIRST, and then helixplayer and helixplayer-mozilla-plugin, install them and quit your software installer.

And that's it! Simply start mozilla or firefox, and you'll be able to play anything for BBC radio (Figure 2). For some reason, it tends to crash with konqueror, so stick with Firefore and Mozilla for your radio needs!