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.

My earlier issues with my router have been fixed! But I’m not quite sure what it was.

Last night, after having done some research on the ‘net, I decided to try and sort the problem out. First of all I removed the WEP security (yes, WEP) and tried the Wii… still not connecting. So I turned WEP back on, but at the same time turned the wireless off and on again. I then changed the channel to 11¹.

I then tried the Wii again… success. And the SoundBridge came on too.

Ok, so it sounds like there was interference on the channel I was on. Except, according to NetStumbler, nobody was and I was getting a clear frequency before. I think when I got my new router I set it to channel 3, but having looked at my past post on changing channels I think I was on 4. Now that might explain why the problems have only started since I got the new router, but I don’t understand what the channel issue was.

Oh well, NetStumbler shows channel 11 to be coming in loud and incredibly clear and all now appears well. But still, all a bit strange.

1. There are other people nearby on this channel but I know the Wii is supposed to connect quicker on this particular channel [↩]

It’s almost daily at the moment that something goes wrong.

Today, after my wife accidentely left the Wii on all night, I realised that a lot of the online facilites aren’t working. The two events are unrelated, just simply that after being left on I decided to test it. And I didn’t test all the Wii online functionality when I changed the router recently.

The web appears to work. And that’s about it. If I do a connection check, it says it’s working but then can’t do a system upgrade check. The news won’t work, and I can’t get on the Nintendo Channel (I assume the Shop Channel is the same).

On top of that my SoundBridge¹ refuses to communicate with the router too. Again, something I didn’t test when I changed the router.

In the case of the SoundBridge, it may be a port change that needs to happen.

My laptop can connect to the internet fine too – it seems to me that internet traffic (port 80?) works fine. But then again, my PC² has no issues at all. It’s all very confusing I have to admit.

If anyone out there has any ideas, I’m open to them. Once I register my router with Netgear I’ll submit a query to them about this. I also have active posts on Wii, SoundBridge and Netgear forums (but so far the responses haven’t been too useful).

1. this streams music from a NAS hard drive that I have [↩]
2. which isn’t connected wirelessly, but if the issue is the firewall on the router, it shouldn’t make a difference [↩]