Viewing WebEx .arf Files Using Linux

Recently I obtained my SFR (Short-Sale, Foreclosure, REO) certification from the National Association of Realtors.  Doing so required that I view three SFR-related webinars.  The problem?  They are using WebEx webinar software which requires use of Cisco’s WebEx ARF viewer which only runs on Mac and Windows.  I use only Linux.

Fortunately, I found that I was able to use the webex ARF viewer under wine.  One important note, however, is that as of this time, the 64bit version of wine does not work well.  I recommend that you install the i586 version of wine.  On a Fedora 11 system, I did the following:

$ sudo yum install wine.i586

Then I downloaded the webex viewer from here. Since the download is an msi file, the way to get it running under wine is to use the msiexec program:

$ msiexec nbr2player.msi

This will set up a wine environment if you don’t already have one and then install the viewer in it. To start the viewer, use the wine program:

$ wine "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/WebEx/WebEx/500/nbrplay.exe"

That’s it. For me, it worked perfectly.

Cisco also has a WRF viewer which is native for linux. I found it here:

http://www.johnoriordan.ie/index.php/2008/03/10/webex-player-on-linux

This will only play WRF files, not ARF files. In order to get it to work under a modern linux distribution, you will have to install the compat-libstdc++-33 package. While this is a native Linux player, it is not open source. If you want a full-featured player, you might want to try the Windows version under Wine (I haven’t tried it).

Now, let’s go watch some webinars!