unexpected trplayer behavior

[Charles Hallenbeck]

My apology for cross posting, but I hope someone somewhere might have some
light to shed on an unexpected behavior of the latest trplayer release,
1.2.0.

I have a .rm file which no longer plays correctly after upgrading to 1.2.0
from a recent beta release, nothing else was changed. Both the beta that
worked correctly and the 1.2.0 version which does not were running with
RealPlayer 8.

The file in question is 439 kb in size. Trplayer reports that it has a bit
rate of 64.7 KB and a playing time of 53 seconds. Trplayer runs for the
full 53 seconds and terminates normally, but only produces sound for about
20 or 25 seconds, silence after that. As I say, the older beta copy worked
fine, it is only the 1.2.0 release that shows this problem.

I know a lot of speakup users also use trplayer and I am hoping somebody
might have a suggestion about what is going on here.

On a related matter: What is 'bit rate' in trplayer anyway? Sometimes it
seems to be sampling rate, but sometimes it seems to be bandwidth, and
other times goodness only knows what it is reporting. Perhaps RealAudio is
a variable bit rate system? I am really puzzled. I have found that
trplayer/realplay does a great job on mp3 files, much better than other
tools on very low bandwidth, and on mp3 biles the 'bity rate' reported by
trplayer is consistently the bandwidth and not the sampling rate; i.e.,
file size divided by playing time equals bit rate, taking units into
account correctly. Sometimes that works for .rm files but often it does
not.

I am puzzled.

Chuck


My web site is http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh 
The Moon is Waxing Crescent (25% of Full)