Helix Player

Matthew Saltzman mjs at ces.clemson.edu
Mon Jan 12 20:07:57 UTC 2004


On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Stephen Walton wrote:

> Well, notwithstanding the recent flame war, I really want to be able to
> listen to NPR on Fedora.
>
> The situtation right now:  I've installed the Helix Player, both by hand
> (unpack archive into /usr/local and make a symbolic link
> /usr/local/bin/hxplay -> /usr/local/HelixPlayer/hxplay) and using Thomas
> Chung's instructions at fedoranews.org.  Either way I get an error box
> "Unexpected error code (0x800400C9)" every time I try to play a Real
> stream.  This is on two quite different pieces of hardware.
>
> Has anyone been able to get HelixPlayer working on FC1?

Haven't tried.  Apropos the previous discussion, here's a case where some
non-FOSS solution is required, but Helix isn't the only choice.  I
installed FOSS gxine from fedora.freshrpms.net and the non-FOSS Windows
codecs from www.mplayerhq.hu.  Then I set gxine to be the default
application for handling Real and MediaPlayer files.  So far, everything
seems to work, including NPR.  A side effect is that I don't have the
problems that some RealPlayer/Helix users have complained about with
registration, phoning home, etc.

Would I like to world to use open standards for streaming so I could have
an end-to-end FOSS solution?  Sure.  But they don't.  I can (and
occasionally do) suggest to NPR that they offer open streaming formats,
but I can't force them to.

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs





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