Embedding RealPlayer movies

Question

Hi everyone, i need to embed a RealPlayer (yes, RealPlayer!) player in a webpage. I'm running into some cross-browser issues and all the stuff i'm Googling seems to be very outdated (Real's official documentation still refers to Netscape 4, for example).

I got my player working with two tags, across all browsers. (Imagine the {url}, {width} and {height} are filled with something) :

<embed src="{url}"
    width="{width}"
    height="{height}"
    type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
    autostart="true"
    controls="imagewindow"
    maintainaspect="true"
    console="video">
</embed>

<embed type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
    width="{width}"
    height="60"
    autostart="true"
    controls="all"
    console="video">
</embed>

This works across all browsers but has one flaw: you can't do any fallback content as you can with the <object> tag, like a message that people should download Realplayer. So i constructed a new version that uses <object> instead of <embed>:

<object
    classid="clsid:CFCDAA03-8BE4-11cf-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA"
    width="{width}"
    height="{height}">
    <param name="src" value="{url}">
    <param name="type" value="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin">
    <param name="autostart" value="true">
    <param name="controls" value="imagewindow">
    <param name="maintainaspect" value="true">
    <param name="console" value="video">

    <p>Download realplayer to view this movie!</p>
</object>

<object classid="clsid:CFCDAA03-8BE4-11cf-B84B-0020AFBBCCFA" width="{width}" height="60">
    <param name="type" value="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin">
    <param name="autostart" value="true">
    <param name="controls" value="all">
    <param name="console" value="video">
</object>

This works in all browsers except Firefox!. I can't really figure out why because Firefox is supposed to understand the <object> tag and also works with Silverlight content that is embedded using <object> without any <embed> tags. Re-adding the <embed> tags again lets the player works in Firefox, but removes the 'Download realplayer' message, which was the reason to use this whole set-up.

Does anybody know a solution that solves this problem?