hp Digital Entertainment Center

Real Player Upgrade

1) Unlock your DEC.
2) Download the set of RealVideo 9 codecs for linux from the real.com
community supported player page. Here is the link: http://docs.real.com/docs/playerpatch/unix/rv9_libc6_i386_cs2.tgz
The main page for this forum can be found here:
http://realforum.real.com/cgi-bin/unixplayer/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=
announcements&Number=3128&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5
3) Copy this file to your DEC. Telnet to your DEC. After gunziping (gunzip <filename>) and untarring (tar -xvf <filename>) this file in
your favorite directory, proceed to copy 2 of the files in this archive to the DECs RealPlayer Codecs directory. Assuming you are in the
directory where you executed the above commands to uncompress this file, do the following:

cp ./rv9/codecs/drv4.so.6.0 /opt/odin/Real/Codecs/
cp ./rv9/codecs/rv40.so.6.0 /opt/odin/Real/Codecs/

4) That's it! Any .rm video sent to the DEC that has been encoded using the new Helix RealVideo 9 codec will be played and decoded without any hassle from the DEC UI.

Alan has tested converting avi streams in Adobe Premiere using their RealMedia Export plugin, and using the Helix Producer 9.0. The .rm files created using these two apps play perfectly on the DEC. Here are some encoding tips to get the best looking picture:

1) Select the 2-Pass Encoding, Variable Bit Rate, and High Quality Resize options.
2) Select the Sharpest Image video
3) Resize your original videos down to 320x240 if you can. Anything higher than this seems to playback a bit choppy on the DEC without any noticeable increase in quality.
4) Select one audience (512k) for your target bitrate. 512k seems to be a good sweet spot for quality vs. size.
5) Approximate rm video size using Producer: 1min 320x240 rm video = 3MB <- Looks better
Approximate rm video size using Premiere: 1min 320x240 rm video = 9MB