[K12OSN] "realPlayer 10 for Linux is here"

[Bill Kendrick]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 07:58:42AM -0500, Petre Scheie wrote:
> Just a follow-up: As mentioned, sound worked for me under IceWM.  Last 
> night I tried it under KDE and Gnome, and it failed with both.  Seems 
> ironic considering those two desktop environments are regarded as more 
> 'deluxe'.  KDE gave an error about not being able to write to /dev/dsp, for 
> which the permisssions were set to 600; but changing it to 666 still didn't 
> give me sound.  I recall that others have reported similar results.

In being "deluxe" both of these environments come with sound server thingies
that applications can all use to 'share' the /dev/dsp device.

Under KDE's Control Center, under "Sound & Multimedia", look for a
"Sound System" section.  If this is enabled, you're probably running
"artsd", the aRts sound daemon.  It's got ahold of the /dev/dsp device,
and applications are expected to talk to IT, instead of to the device
directly.

I use this at home, and it allows me to listen to music streams in Amarok
while at the same time having the new KDE text-to-speech system (ktts)
read web pages for me. :^)

If you can convince RealPlayer to talk to aRts instead of /dev/dsp
directly, that should work well.

Or, you can simply disable aRts, or tell it not to 'hold on' to
/dev/dsp when aRts-capable apps aren't using the sound system.
(There's some kind of "turn off after idle" option in there.  I don't
have a KDE desktop handy right now, so sorry for being so vague.)

If RealPlayer doesn't "know" about aRts, you can still convince it to
use it by providing a 'fake' device.  Simply run the RealPlayer
application through "artsdsp".

In other words, if you have a situation like this:

  $ some_program
  Error: Cannot open /dev/dsp

"Hrm, who has /dev/dsp open?"

  $ lsof /dev/dsp
  COMMAND   PID USER  ...   NAME
  artsd     123 joe   ...   /dev/dsp

You can try this:

  $ artsdsp some_program

When it goes to open /dev/dsp, it will actually be talking to aRts.


The Enlightenment Sound Daeom ('esd') has a similar tool, if I recall.
("esddsp" I guess?)


It might make sense to create a new 'application' in your KDE and/or GNOME
menu called "RealPlayer thru aRts" and then simply make it identical
to the normal RealPlayer one, except stick "artsdsp" at the beginning
of the command.


Hope that helps!  Sorry if I'm kinda rambling. Just downing my first
coffee of the day. ;)

-bill!