Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Getting BBC iPlayer going on Ubuntu

27th January 2008

Following on from my earlier musings of the subject, I finally have got the BBC’s iPlayer going on my Ubuntu set up. To do this, I needed to get my hands on the plug-in files nphelix.so and nphelix.xpt. Once that was done (more on how I did that later), I popped the former into /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, the latter into /usr/lib/firefox/components and restarted Firefox. I think that a system restart might have helped me too, even if it was done another reason. The files themselves were culled from the RealPlayer folder populated by the installer (realplay-10.0.9.809-linux-2.2-libc6-gcc32-i586.bin was what I used) that I had downloaded from the Helix Community website; the plugin files were found in the mozilla subfolder under RealPlayer.

BBC iPlayer

Another thing that I did was to fire Alacarte, Gnome’s menu editor and add Configuration Editor (also known as GConf, I believe) to the System tools submenu on the Applications menu. Once added to the menu, I fired up the said application. Navigating to desktop>gnome>url-handlers>rtsp, I changed the command to realplay "%s". I don’t know if this helps but it certainly was no hindrance and I got the result that I wanted and in high quality audio too.

Gnome Configuration Editor

Comments:

  • Paul Twibill says:

    Hi,
    Interesting. Are you saying Realplayer plug-ins do not install correctly in Firefox on Ubuntu (or if I recall correctly this used to have to be done manually anyway)? I only noticed Ubuntu not working with BBC iPlayer after watching it working on a Asus EeePC with Xandros perfectly ok. Similarly on Opensuse 10.3. Don’t recall any special process to make these work. Tried updating Flash player made a difference…iPlayer start icon failed completely! Will check Firefox plug-ins.

    Any progress since January?

  • John Hennessy says:

    Yes, the RealPlayer plug-in needs to be manually added to Firefox on Ubuntu and OpenSUSE works “out of the box”. Recently, I gave the Ubuntu 8.04 beta a go and the same problem seems to exist there too but I’ll take a longer look into it. With the manual process, I have got what I want and have done no further fiddling on this front since then.

  • John Hennessy says:

    The play/pause/forward buttons and volume control stopped working for me so I pottered around the BBC website to see if I could find anything and I ended up updating RealPlayer to the latest version using the process described above; 11 is now available for Linux.

  • Ralph Hodgson says:

    Also having problems with RealPlayer 10 after updating to Ubuntu 8.04. I had BBC working fine in the previous version. I have configured FireFox; now need to try RealPlayer 11.

  • John Hennessy says:

    I can confirm that RealPlayer 11 did the trick for me but I have hung onto Firefox 2 for sake of retaining addons. When the plugin writers catch up with Firefox 3, I’ll make the jump then.

  • John Hennessy says:

    Here’s another possible option for getting RealPlayer’s open source alter-ego, Helix Player, working with Firefox: using Aptitude. The command that you need to issue to install the plugin is as follows:

    sudo aptitude install mozilla-helix-player

    Ubuntu Geek has a blog entry on this and the wider installation of Helix Player.

  • All the views that you find expressed on here in postings and articles are mine alone and not those of any organisation with which I have any association, through work or otherwise. As regards editorial policy, whatever appears here is entirely of my own choice and not that of any other person or organisation.

  • Please note that everything you find here is copyrighted material. The content may be available to read without charge and without advertising but it is not to be reproduced without attribution. As it happens, a number of the images are sourced from stock libraries like iStockPhoto so they certainly are not for abstraction.

  • With regards to any comments left on the site, I expect them to be civil in tone of voice and reserve the right to reject any that are either inappropriate or irrelevant. Comment review is subject to automated processing as well as manual inspection but whatever is said is the sole responsibility of the individual contributor.