Ok, here’s the latest on my problems with Real Player.

After writing the original post, I tried my Netbook and found I was having the same problems. However, the same Netbook, connected to my work’s wireless network, would work fine. Conclusion – the problem was with my router or ISP.

Time to dig out the router that O2 sent me and I’d never used…. connected that up and…. Real Player worked!  So, it was my Netgear router.

Over the weekend I’ve been exchanging various emails with Netgear and, after escalation to some more senior engineers, the problem has been resolved. And it was fixed by…. downgrading the routers firmware. I was obviously being a bit too keen and I was on the latest firmware.

Anyway, it’s all now working and I’m happy once more.

I’ll admit, I’m a fan of Radio 4. Both the serious stuff and the comedies. However, I rarely get to listen to them at the time so I’m dependant on the iPlayer for catching up in the week.

Unfortunately, something has gone wrong and I’ve been left with nothing to listen to. Kind of.

It all started yesterday. I was off work and wanted to listen to a radio show on iPlayer. Except all I got was a garbled sound. At first, I thought it was iPlayer, which has been recently upgraded to give a higher quality audio quality. I posted on the iPlayer forums and got… well, no response. However, I noticed that I was having no problems with watching TV shows on iPlayer. The TV component of it appears to use Flash, whereas radio uses Real Player.

Star Trek Trailer

So I start up Real Player and try viewing one of their movie trailers. The picture, as well as the sound, is badly fractured and, well, unwatchable (you can see an example – a trailer from the new Star Trek film – to the right). So it appeared the problem is with Real Player and not iPlayer itself. Now, here comes the problem with the BBC using a commercial products such as Real Player – it’s a free product with no support other than forums. And no guarantees.

I’ve been through their FAQs and posted on their forums – I’ll give them their dues, there’s been a few responses from a member of Real. However, it still doesn’t work and I think I’ve exhausted all suggestions. It appears to be a lack of bandwidth, but it’s fine, and Quicktime, Flash and WMP can stream with no issues.

And to top it all off, the iPlayer changes means that they now fall foul of my work’s firewall, which didn’t happen before. So I can’t listen there either.

If anybody has any ideas, then I’m happen to hear them. It’s very frustrating and, I’ll admit, the only reason I have Real Player installed is for iPlayer – if that doesn’t work anymore, it will simply get uninstalled.

Many of my plugins read from XML or RSS feeds. In these cases, I read the files using the PHP file_get_contents() command. However, if you get the following error…

Warning: file_get_contents(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

..then this means that your PHP is not configured to allow this command.

If you can, edit your php.ini file (usually located in /etc/php.ini) and make sure this line is in it:

allow_url_fopen = On

If you can’t edit php.ini, you can try the following…

If you don’t have one already, create a file called .htaccess in your root folder. Now add the following line:

php_value allow_url_fopen on

If that doesn’t work then, well, that’s probably down to restrictions by your host.