How to Play Real Media Files on Mplayer - Mepis 8

Kmplayer Playing Monster.rmvb

I have never been a fan of Real Player, but it was there in my every installation of Windows or Linux. Reason? Some of my old audio and video collections.

Before MP3 and XviD stuff became the mainstay of Web and standalone Players, there was Real Media. I still have have some ra, rm audio, and rm, rmvb video that I can't find in any other format. Nor can I convert them to today's popular formats, because they are already very much compressed and lossy.

Well, I used to play them in the Linux port of RealPlayer. But the latest debian package of RealPlayer couldn't play it on one of my beloved Mepis 8 installation. Don't know why. They somebody told me that you can play them on Mplayer (one of very popular native media players on linux) with alsa-oss and w32codecs. And Lo, it worked.

So, those of you who would like to play Real Media files, need not have to install RealPlayer, you can play them quite well on Mplayer (KMPlayer, SMPlayer & GMPlayer) with alsa-oss and w32codecs installed. Of Course, you can't stream audio and video from Real Networks.

It works for me on Mepis 8. Hope, it will work on your Linux Flavor too.