RutSum

Real Media On PCLinuxOS

You realize how true shitty phrases such as “necessary evil” are, only when you truly face something like it. Real did only one good thing in the entire time it has been in existence - it created a bunch of media formats (rm, rv, rmvb) that have awesome compression with minimal loss in quality. But after they did that - they gave you good reasons to hate them too - they made sure that their format would remain proprietary and exclusive to them, and tried to force this on Linux users too. They did everything they could to make it difficult for us to use their format without their codecs.

I posted earlier on how RM and RMVB files had managed to make my life miserable, because of their poor compatibility with Linux. I tried to play them with all players out there for Linux, installed all codecs required, but in vain. With Real Player for Linux, I did achieve some success, but it still wasn’t satisfactory.

Apparently this problem was native to PCLinuxOS, and I did recently manage to solve it. The glitch lies in the package win32-codecs. The package installed all the codecs in the directory /usr/lib/win32, while all the players looked for the codecs in the directories /usr/lib/codecs and /usr/lib/real. This was the main problem, and I couldn’t locate it because I assumed that after installing the package, the codecs were available to the players, and the problem lay in the codec itself.

To fix this, all I had to do was create 2 symlinks, /usr/lib/codecs and /usr/lib/real, both of which pointed to /usr/lib/win32. To do this,

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s win32 codecs
$ sudo ln -s win32 real

Another problem that I faced today was that I couldn’t associate KPlayer to open with RMVB on a double click through Konqueror. I tried everything, moving KPlayer to top priority in application preferences, completely removing all other players from the application preference list, checking the “Remember application association for this type of file”, and changing preferences in KDE Control Center.

The reason for this problem was that KDE treated rmvb files as “RealMedia” instead of “RealVideo”, and placed it under that ‘applications’ mimetype rather than the ‘video’ mimetype.

To fix this, I fired up KDE Control Center, went to ‘KDE Components’ and then ‘File Associations’. In the search box, I searched for ‘rm’. Then in the results, under ‘application’, vnd.rn-realmedia, I removed *.rmvb from the ‘Filename Patterns’ box, and added it to the vnd.rn-realvideo, which was also in the search results. Then I moved KPlayer to the top position in the ‘Application Preference Order’ box. A quick session reboot, and all was ok.

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