realplayer, streams blocked in fedora 9

[stan]

joelvsmith at earthlink.net wrote:
> I am running Fedora 9 and I have been trying to use realplayer 11 and kaffeine to play streams.  after disabling the firewall and selinux i still cannot remedy the problem.  
>
>
[snip]
>
> I have looked at 
>
> system -> preferences -> hardware -> sound and volume control
>
> everything is unmuted.
>
> the only thing that seems weird is that the 
> system -> preferences -> hardware -> sound -> sound capture -> test does not produce a sound.  
>
> is there something i am missing here that is interfering with realplayer and other streams from working.  kaffeine makes contact with an internet radio stream but there is no sound.  i believe i tried to get mplayer to play at the stream as well. 
>
> ---
>
> I just found some notes about mplayer and fedora 9 which suggested that mplayer should be configured with pulse audio and not alsa.  i changed real player to use OSS and not alsa and now it works...  but it seems to me that oss sounds more muddy than the default sound system.
>
> is there any way to improve the sound quality?
>
>

Configuration issues.  The fact you can play through OSS says that alsa 
is working fine because OSS is now just an emulation level running on 
top of alsa.  That is probably why it doesn't sound as good, one more 
layer of processing.

As far as configuration goes, any sound server you have running will 
block alsa apps from connecting.  I doubt it will help much, but could 
you run the script at this location
http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa/raw-file/tip/alsa-info.sh
and then post back the link so that people can see your sound setup?  
The script scans your machine and extracts out things relevant for 
diagnosis and puts them on a website.  It gives you a link to the 
information that you can post here. 

You can try removing the package pulseaudio-alsa and see if realplayer 
will then play through alsa.  That should improve your sound quality.  
But if realplayer has a plugin for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is 
running, it should have played when you used the pulseaudio plugin.