[Macworld.com]

Macworld forum visitor, JetPilot, was dismayed to discover that when he or she visited Eithne Ni Bhraonain's (aka, Enya) website and attempted to stream a video saved in QuickTime format, RealPlayer opened instead. After some poking around, I discovered the source of the problem. [more]

[pep]

Or don't install real player to begin with.

[vdubya]

I think that must be the case as well. I removed that virus called 'realplayer', and had no problem playing the QT videos on Enya's site.

[cek2go]

Is there a way to do the opposite? Can I get QuickTime to play RealOne Player content? Case in point: I enjoy listening to This American Life from http://thislife.org/. Can I get those RealOne Player streams to play in QuickTime instead of RealOne Player?
I mean...fair is fair!

[Peter Cohen]

Tsk. The title "Unreal Enya" had me fantasizing about first person shooters featuring former Clannad singers. How disappointing. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Chris Breen]

cek2go: Well, no, Although RealPlayer tries to play these clips, it can't because they're QuickTime files -- it's a format incompatible with Real. Likewise, Real clips won't play in QuickTime.
Chris

[Chris Breen]

Peter: My guess is that any Unreal characters based on New Age types -- Enya, Yawn-i, etc -- wouldn't be much of a challenge. They'd probably just stand there, looking at you with their pleading, puppy-dog eyes. OTOH, Yawn-i might bore the other players to death.
Chris

[cek2go]

Chris,
I've been using Audio Hijack to "time shift" my listening of this program (and others that are in RealOne Player) and download them onto my iPod. It has been a three-step process (hijack RealOne Player and save to aiff, then over to iTunes to re-encode at AAC, then make bookmarkable via an Applescript).
I just upgraded to Audio Hijack Pro 2 and now this can be accomplished in one step- hijack RealOne Player straight to AAC Bookmarkable and into iTunes. Fantastic!
I've found that sometimes RealPlayer One isn't as "smooth" as QuickTime when it comes to streaming so I thought I might be able to switch one for the other but I guess not. No worries!
Thanks for the response.
Christopher
PS: I miss seeing you and Leo on TechTv's Call for Help!

[liquidrock]

Well, for me, the right thing happened and I have many media players installed. In my mind, the bigger issue here is that current web developers don't spend enough time researching the issues to ensure a good user experience.
First, browsers don't natively support RTSP. So to code the page using an RTSP URL is kinda, well, sorry but foolish. Wrapping the RTSP URL in a QuickTime reference movie would be a suck-less option.
Secondly, knowing that multiple media players offer to "support" various protocols and file formats, the web developer could have "forced" the QT movies to do the right thing by adding additional HTML code.
One thing is for sure, at the end of the day, the only people who loose here is the user.

[Chris Breen]

I agree. What made this so confounding for JetPilot is that streamed QuickTime movies on other sites worked as they should, which indicates that the folks behind Enya's site didn't implement this properly.
Chris

[sgmorr]

This is interesting. I had kind of the opposite problem but it was related to RTSP also. A few months back I was trying to watch video on CSpan. It was in Real format (specifically RTSP) but Safari and IE both kept trying to open it in QT which of course did not work. Although RealOne was set to open these files I could never get it to open instead of QT. This all happened about the time of the URI handler scare when people were using MisFox (and others) to change file mappings and protocol helpers. I used MisFox to correctly set RTSP to be handled by RealOne. It worked.
Steve M.

[grobbins]

RealPlayer isn't "hijacking" anything. rtsp is a URL protocol, not a file type. It's completely ambiguous as to what kind of file is pointed to by an rtsp URL; it could be (and usually is) a RealAudio or RealVideo file, but it could also be a QuickTime file (though most QuickTime files streamed via Real-Time Streaming Protocol are initiated with an http link instead of an rtsp link, as is much RealMedia content.)
There are two mechanisms in Mac OS X for determining which helper application should be given a file or URL from the web. The old mechanism, called InternetConfig, can be controlled by applications. You can see the InternetConfig settings in Internet Explorer's preferences, under File Helpers and Protocol Helpers.
The newer mechanism in Mac OS X is called Launch Services. Unfortunately, Apple hasn't provided a way for Launch Services to be configured by applications, so it is a bit of a crap shoot. Users can set preferred applications for file types via Get Info in the Finder (using the Change All button), but that doesn't help for assigning protocols like rtsp (or ftp or any others.) Safari sometimes uses InternetConfig and sometimes uses Launch Services in figuring out which helper application to hand a file or stream to.
When RealPlayer first runs, it asks users if the InternetConfig setting for rtsp should be assigned to RealPlayer; since the vast majority of URLs that begin with rtsp are for RealMedia content, that is the proper default. Unfortunately, there's no "right" setting for which application should handle rtsp, since the protocol alone doesn't say what kind of file is being streamed.
Incidentally, the new RealPlayer 10 can play back QuickTime content as well (using QuickTime itself) so rtsp URLs to QuickTime audio and video files will work fine when web browsers hand them to RealPlayer 10.
Both QuickTime's and RealPlayer's preferences have checkboxes for taking the rtsp entry in InternetConfig, but neither affects the Launch Services rtsp handler.

[dougster]

-Chris,
Just ran across your fix on the Enya's sound/video and thanks for posting. I believe Ms. Bhraonain should reward you for your polking around for the fix. Thanks /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif ..and its always nice to have a Macster launch the proper application.

[dfowle]

Thanks for that Peter, I nearly lost my coffee to my keyboard over the Unreal-Enya connection you made.
Always good to have a chuckle in the morning /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif