I downloaded and ran the Air America Widget in Tiger many times and it always times out. The url says end=180.I have the same problem playing Democracy Now in RealPlayer for OS X. Any idea what’s going on? I have the latest version of RealPlayer for OS-X.

RSM

Sorry, you need to be more specific. What do you mean by “times out”? Do you mean that you launch the widget and it grinds but never plays anything? That the “Play” button reverts to the triangle-play mode instead of the double-bar pause mode?

And where do you get the URL from? Does the widget open a web page? Mine doesn’t. I don’t even see where it could appear on the widget itself.

So please write out in detail what you’re using, what you do, and exactly how the result manifests itself–hard to help without that much.

In the meantime, you can try going to the main page of this blog and clicking the red “Air America Stream” button on the linkboard; that should open Real Player directly.

Thank you so much for your rapid response and interest in my problem.

My problem occurs no matter from where I start AirAmerica or any other stream in RealPlayer for OS-X, the latest version. And it was happening before Tiger with older versions of RealPlayer. No problem like this with WMP.

Here’s the stream URL for AA as indicated in the error dialog box that states “The connection to the server has timed out. You may be experiencing network problems.”

rtsp://rx-lvl3-pa23.rbn.com/farm/*/airam/airam/live/live.rm?end=180:00

This is exactly what I see when I use the widget to sign on to AA except that the number after the “pa” is different (26). It usually occurs within about 3 minutes.

It occurs whether I use Firefox or Safari to start the stream from the AA website. Same problem for Democracy Now.

I turned off the firewall on my Powerbook G4 but the problem still occurred.

Does this help?

By the way, you have a great blog. The bird pix are wonderful.

RSM

Bob:

Hmm, strange. When I enter that URL into my browser, QuickTime opens up and stays on perpetual pause to a streamed broadcast which isn’t there.

From what I can tell, rx-lvl3-pa23.rbn.com refers to the realplayer server with the stream–rbn.com is the realplayer hosting site. As for the “end=180:00” part, I assume that is added on after three minutes of failure to connect.

Do you have another computer at the same location (residence)? If so, can you successfully use RealPlayer on that computer? I ask because perhaps your IP has been blocked as part of a block that contains mass spammers or people attempting Denial of Service attacks or some such.

Another possibility might be something on your computer or something with your ISP which is interfering with the connection–a firewall setting, for example.

Call up your ISP, tell them what’s happening, and see if they don’t have some sort of security thing set up that might be causing the problem.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, Tell me how those checks turn out.

the part that says “end=180” is an instruction to the server to stop the stream after 3 hours. To save the trouble of coming back to my ‘puter and restarting it, I bookmarked the url with that part edited off. Then it would run for days on end at times… hth

I’m having trouble with this widget as well. Whenever I open it, it will play for a minute or so and then just stop. The widget still indicates that it is playing, but no sound is coming out. I press the stop button and play again and the same thing happens.

I’m not sure what the problem is, but it’s been going on since I got my MacBook last month. I don’t have problems with any other media. What could be the problem?