realplayer, streams blocked in fedora 9

[joelvsmith at earthlink.net]

I am running Fedora 9 and I have been trying to use realplayer 11 and kaffeine to play streams.  after disabling the firewall and selinux i still cannot remedy the problem.  

realplayer crashes and produces an error report.

System: Linux 2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 #1 SMP Thu May 1 06:28:41 EDT 2008 i686
X Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Vendor Release: 10499901
Selinux: Permissive
Accessibility: Disabled
GTK+ Theme: Nodoka
Icon Theme: Fedora

Memory status: size: 0 vsize: 0 resident: 0 share: 0 rss: 0 rss_rlim: 0
CPU usage: start_time: 0 rtime: 0 utime: 0 stime: 0 cutime:0 cstime: 0 timeout: 0 it_real_value: 0 frequency: 0



----------- .xsession-errors ---------------------
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
*** Is your sound server running?
*** See: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Troubleshooting
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
*** Is your sound server running?
*** See: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Troubleshooting
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
*** Is your sound server running?
*** See: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Troubleshooting
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
*** Is your sound server running?
*** See: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Troubleshooting
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
*** Is your sound server running?
*** See: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Troubleshooting
--------------------------------------------------

I have looked at 

system -> preferences -> hardware -> sound and volume control

everything is unmuted.

the only thing that seems weird is that the 
system -> preferences -> hardware -> sound -> sound capture -> test does not produce a sound.  

is there something i am missing here that is interfering with realplayer and other streams from working.  kaffeine makes contact with an internet radio stream but there is no sound.  i believe i tried to get mplayer to play at the stream as well.  

---

I just found some notes about mplayer and fedora 9 which suggested that mplayer should be configured with pulse audio and not alsa.  i changed real player to use OSS and not alsa and now it works...  but it seems to me that oss sounds more muddy than the default sound system.

is there any way to improve the sound quality?