During my recent font problems, after reinstalling Mac OS X, I discovered that I couldn't watch Real content in a browser anymore. Reinstalling the RealOne Player application didn't bring back the plugin, and installing the beta of RealPlayer 10 didn't help either. After an amazingly fruitless series of emails to Real's support people I searched the forums at macosxhints.com and found what I was looking for.

So, for anyone who's arrived here after a google search, here's what I did. As always, YMMV.

The solution has been to manually put aliases of the RealPlayer 10 plugin files into the Internet Plugins directory of the main Library folder of the system. For some reason these aliases were not being created on my system when RealPlayer 10 was first installed and configured. The Real plugin files are not easily accessible however. They are located in the application package itself and must be accessed using the "Show Package Contents" function on the Mac OS X system. Right-click on the RealPlayer 10 application (or control-click if you've only got one mouse button) and choose "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu. Then navigate to Contents/Mac OS/ and you'll see the two plugin files which need aliases. Make aliases of both "RealPlayer plugin" and "RealPlayer Plugin.plugin" and then move those aliases to the Internet Plugins folder inside the main Library folder. Quit the browser and relaunch it, and the plugin should be available.

This concludes today's public service announcement.