I’m a big fan of Karambolage, a weekly telecast produced by the French-German television channel Arte. The show analyses and explains both French and German idiosyncrasies and curiosities. An excellent example is their film on the accidental broadcast of an old version of Helmut Kohl’s New Year speech by German television in 1986. Unfortunately, I miss most of their program due to time constraints. This is not a big problem however, as Arte provides video streaming in Real Media format for the last four editions.
As I recently switched to a new laptop (more on this in a later post), I had to install RealPlayer from scratch. I would prefer it, if Arte streamed using excellent open source technologies, but RealPlayer is at least better than some other proprietary options.
After I had installed RealPlayer on Ubuntu Linux 7.04, I had video, but no sound. If you experience the same problem, try the following.
By default RealPlayer uses the esd sound daemon. First install the alsa-oss driver and try, if you get sound with it.
sudo apt-get install alsa-ossaoss realplay
If you got sound, you can switch from esd to aoss permanently by editing the start script of RealPlayer.
sudo gedit /usr/bin/realplay
In the start script of RealPlayer try to find the line
REALPLAYBIN=$HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin
and replace it with
REALPLAYBIN="/usr/bin/aoss $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin"
Don’t forget the quotation marks. Now save the file and fire up realplay again. This time without prepending aoss of course. If you get sound again, everything is OK. If you do not get sound now, but got sound one step earlier, you probably made a mistake when you edited the script. Open the script again and check, if you made a typo or something.
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