Thursday, July 17, 2008

RealPlayer 11 + Mac = No WiFi

RealPlayerImage via WikipediaI have been having major connectivity issues on my MacBook for the past week. Dropping the connection, pages not loading, streaming media stuttering. I spent days searching Google to find out what the issue could be and tried everything - deleting preference files, clearing my PRAM, rebooting, reconfiging my Airport, reboot, reboot, reboot.... all with no luck. There are tons of forums that have lots of theories as to what is causing it (and lots of people yelling at Apple to fix the problem).

In my case, it was something simple. RealPlayer 11 was the cause. Presumably something to do with the "stream catching" feature. Granted, it is a cool feature that will let you rip YouTube videos, songs from Pandora, and more... but the damn thing my computer virtually unusable for 3 days. I dragged the app to my trashcan and all my issues were resolved instantly (didn't even need to reboot).

I'm not sure if there was a setting or config in RealPlayer 11 that could have been switched to remedy the problem, but if you are having similar problems you may want to see if this is the culprit.
Zemanta Pixie

4 comments:

Hansjoerg @ tunesBag said...

That's interesting ... I have seen that the WiFi Connection is away every 10 minutes for some seconds during the last few days without any changes on the hardware ... removed now RP11 as well and hope the problem has gone now!

Anonymous said...

I think there is a deeper problem. Why are you even bothering to use such a piece of crap like RealPlayer? They haven't had anything useful for, what, 8+ years now. Move along, nothing to see here.

Anonymous said...

Hi- I just wanted to update you and let you know that this problem is currently being addressed by the product team. It sounds like one of them has experienced a similar issue so they are trying to work through it. I will keep you posted on any news.

Lacy

Anonymous said...

Hi -- I'm on the development team for RealPlayer for Mac OS X, and I'm following up on what Lacy said.

If anyone has seen this problem first-hand, could you shoot me an email? bobclark (at) real.com will get to me.

Thanks.
--Bob