Realplayer Woes

Hiya,

At my place of work they have decided they need to have Realplayer installed on their systems despite my protests. I have never been a fan of realplayer, recent revisions in my opinion are too bloated and complicated, the old versions were fine. Anyway I have tried the following versions of realplayer (each with their own problems)

Realplayer Basic 8
Realone Player 1
Realone Player 2
Realplayer Enterprise http://www.realnetworks.com/products/rpe/
Real Alternative http://www.free-codecs.com/download/...lternative.htm

but on none of them have I found a good way of updating them, they all seem to rely on the auto update component or realplayer which we do not want going through the firewall. You can get Realplayer Enterprise manager but that is expensive. Just with the recent warning about security problems I realised that it could be quite serious not patching realplayer, just look of the scope of these vulnerabilities http://service.real.com/help/faq/security . It looks to me like it is almost as bad as not patching IE to leave this think unpatched, arbitery code execution from clicking on a link, nasty.

Anyone have any ideas of how to patch it ?

I have many users on each machine and they do not want to have to get past all that registration stuff etc so I usually register it in the default local profile (we don't do roaming) so it doesn't ask anyone. The problem is when you try and install a new realplayer it uninstalls the old one, making them register again, although I have been known to disable this by using a registry entry.

The only other way I can think of doing it is to use auto update on once machine and see which files it changes and deploy these updated files by means of a script.

Once again, help

Thanks

uknetsec

I think that the only option is to use the auto update, unless real networks posts up their patches on the net to be downloaded.

On my computer, realplayer barely works, most of the time it produces all kinds of errors and windows shuts it down. it uses a lot of cpu, and leaves behind an entry which checks for updates all the time, which that too uses a lot of memory. Use a start up manager, or msconfig to disable the auto update from starting.

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On my computer, realplayer barely works, most of the time it produces all kinds of errors and windows shuts it down. it uses a lot of cpu, and leaves behind an entry which checks for updates all the time, which that too uses a lot of memory. Use a start up manager, or msconfig to disable the auto update from starting

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The more recent versions of RealPlayer will let you disable the Message Center (which causes most problems for people). Try adjusting that and see if it fixes your problem. Also, the Enterprise edition is a severly trimmed down version of RealPlayer which causes a lot less conflicts and problems than the consumer product. Just a tip.

AJ

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I think that the only option is to use the auto update, unless real networks posts up their patches on the net to be downloaded.

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That is what I feared, they do not realease patches, at least not to the general public, you may be able to get them if you pay for their software.

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Also, the Enterprise edition is a severly trimmed down version of RealPlayer which causes a lot less conflicts and problems than the consumer product. Just a tip.

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The real alternative program seems really good and is a modified version of Windows Media Player, version 6 I think. It is a lot better in terms of being less heavy on memory and generally causes less problems. The problem with it is that it introduces other options I don't want, like the ability to control the media player remotely and browse the files on the computer remotely through a web browser with no password. You can turn this option off but there is no way to stop users turning it back on, if it weren't for that I would use that program instead.