Real Meadia (evil) sadly have a very big share of the on-line streaming market. They started out as quite a good company with some technically good products but have been consumed by an evil marketing department which have destroyed an otherwise great player. This guide will show you now you can add Real Media support to Linux and get access to all those streams that you currently can't use.

Media players under Linux are not yet very good. They are generally difficult to install and fairly prone to crashing or suffering other querky bugs. Saying that though they aren't so bad that media playback under Linux is a dead loss - far from it infact - you just need to put in a little more effort. Using Debian means that you have another hurdle to jump as well and I imagine many people give up at this point. Many of the media players come bundled with codecs that are restriced in one way or another, such as by licenses or patents, which means Debian will not package or provide them. This leads to the current situation where there is no official mplayer package for Debian (there is a very good unofficial package though).

Although there is no mplayer package there is a xine package and in my experience this is as good as mplayer and, as an added bonus, can use the mplayer codecs. Install xine and a nice frontend for it, I recommend kaffeine as it exposes much of the power of xine with a user friendly UI. I tried gxine as well but it didn't provide many options and tended to crash with a segmentation fault when it went fall screen.

Once you have xine installed you will find that it can out-of-the-box play most media but it has some limitations. One of the biggest is that is can't play real audio (real media) streams. As we all know real media is evil personified but a lot of places (for instance the BBC) only stream in real format. To solve this problem you need to get the mplayer codec pack and in particular the cook.so.6.0 codec. I just grabbed the whole codec pack and fed that to xine. To make xine use the freshly downloaded codecs you have to set the path to the real player codecs in the xine config file. If you are using just xine the config file is in "~/.xine/config" however this file will be in "~/.kaffeine/config" if you are using kaffeine. The line that you wnat to change is:

# path to real player codecs, if installed
# string, default: unknown
#codec.real_codecs_path:unknown

to

# path to real player codecs, if installed
# string, default: unknown
#codec.real_codecs_path:/usr/lib/win32

Simply unzip the codec pack into the stated directory and you are ready to go.