RealMedia support in Windows Media Player 9

I'm not sure if the version of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 on my ZT-180 is R2 or R3 (or neither), but it definitely has greater capabilities than my other CE 6 devices. In addition to the Flash support I've reported in another thread, I recently found out it also has RealMedia support (ie, RealPlayer audio and video files: .ra, .rm) in Windows Media Player 9. That's a very useful feature since RealPlayer for Windows Mobile doesn't seem to work properly on my CE 6 devices. I haven't seen any mention of this anywhere online (a Web search didn't even turn up any discussion of this on Microsoft's Windows Embedded pages), so I thought I'd share it with folks here.

Can you find the RA codecs in the file system? Perhaps they're registerable.

The thought crossed my mind, but I'm not sure I can identify them. I don't see any plugin files in \Windows when all files are visible. There are several DLLs I don't recognize, but I have no way to tell what they're for. (Nothing starting with "ra" - or "rm" or "real" or anything like that.)

try a registry search for real, the codec has to have a registration entry in the clsid.

Searching the registry with the keyword 'real' only produces the entries for recently run RealMedia files (which are in folders with 'Real' in the name). There are registry keys for .ra and .rm in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT that point to the existing 'audiofile' and 'videofile' keys, respectively, associated with WMP9. (Needless to say, copying those registry keys into another CE 6 device's registry doesn't enable WMP9 support of these files on the other device.) Any ideas what other keyword(s) I might try to locate the codecs' CLSIDs?

Can you export the entire registry? Two heads are better than one as they say.

CE Geek has sent me the reg export.

I believe that IMAPxParser.dll is the doobrit. It seems to have associates such as IMAPxMFCFilter.dll which look like part of RealRlayer for CE.

So I found the following files in \Windows:

imapx_display_drv.dll
imapx_sdi0.dll
imapx_video_drv.dll
IMAPxAudioDecFilter.dll
IMAPxDec9170.dll
IMAPxMemAllocator.dll
IMAPxMFCFilter.dll
IMAPxMFCFilter_HD.dll
IMAPxOSDRenderer.dll
IMAPxParser.dll

However, all these files are in ROM, and Total Commander won't let me copy them to another location.

Boo.

So another question is where did these helix filters come from in the first place?

I found a plugin from xda-developers.com that provides at least partial RealMedia support:

http://www.freewareppc.com/multimedia/rmvbplugin.shtml

After installing the files in \Windows on one of my CE 6 netbooks (which do not natively include RealMedia support for WMP9) and importing the .reg file, I can open RealMedia files, but so far I'm only getting the audio on .rm files that are supposed to display video. Maybe someone else will want to try this with his/her RealMedia files to see if (s)he gets better results.

CE Geek, does the ZT-180 have a sort of CE flash rom script a la the wm8505/8650s? I know I could play with the raw files that way..

No, there's no "script" folder - it's just .img files, so there's no way to customize it unless you know how to build those .img files. There are some threads about flashing the ZT-180 with CE 6 on slatedroid.com.