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Thank you! I was about to lose my mind since I have read this release just 3 days ago. Also knowing Nokia ALWAYS stayed out of such closed (especially ms!) formats.

https://helixcommunity.org/forum/forum.php?forum_i d=325

Hmm, ok, when my 7650 dies (don't think so), my next phone will be Nokia.

As part of the companies' joint announcement today, Nokia and Real officially communicated that Nokia has both licensed the latest Helix DNA Client code base and has officially joined the Helix Community.

https://helixcommunity.org/forum/forum.php?forum_i d=325

Let me add one thing myself. Realplayer actually works in my 2mb ram Nokia 7650.

According to the Gantt Chart, the server and client implementations should be complete and the 'done' milestone is set tentatively for Sep 1 2004.

Must be vapor.

Does anyone know what's happened to the Helix grant that was supposed to bring VoIP to Jabber last year. https://jabber.helixcommunity.org/

You should be. Everyone else can read the source and determine exactly what their stuff does now days.

Disclaimer - I work for RealNetworks on Helix Player / RealPlayer for linux

RealVideo 10 is definitely worth a look. There are players for Mac, Windows, Linux desktop, Linux Embedded, and Symbian. People can create additional players for new platforms in the Helix Community. RealAudio 10 comes in several flavours, including lossless and multichannel.

The producer apps page may be a good place to start if you want to try out the encoder.

Disclaimer - I work for RealNetworks on Helix Player / RealPlayer for linux

RealVideo 10 is definitely worth a look. There are players for Mac, Windows, Linux desktop, Linux Embedded, and Symbian. People can create additional players for new platforms in the Helix Community. RealAudio 10 comes in several flavours, including lossless and multichannel.

The producer apps page may be a good place to start if you want to try out the encoder.

Use Ogg (Theora + Vorbis). Codec for windows are available. Real player supports it. VLC can also be used. On *nix, all players (mplayer/xine) support it. And most importantly, its Open Source. As its adoption increases, its support will grow automatically.

Although I would never recommend producing RealMedia content for Windows users (I really hate the RealOne player), it's a different matter if your audience is UNIX! Never thought I'd be saying this, but it's actually quite pleasant playing Real videos on Linux/UNIX/Solaris using RealPlayer which actually comes out of Real's open source Helix project. The only platform I know of where there isn't a good player for Real content is Windows.

Works on linux(Helix Community), mac (www.real.com) and windows of course. And if it is a pay-site and you can afford to buy the encoders you can get professional support as well.

We work with the xiph guys. Helix Player is a great GPL-only player that plays back ogg theora and vorbis, and excludes binary only components like RA/RV. http://xiph.helixcommunity.org

Documentation on using the gtk helix widget

Info on our awesome mp3 decoder

mp3 codec source (fixed and floating point)

For the real scoop on licensing, contact the public mailing list open-licensing@helixcommunity.org. The parent post is largely incorrect.

Documentation on using the gtk helix widget

Info on our awesome mp3 decoder

mp3 codec source (fixed and floating point)

For the real scoop on licensing, contact the public mailing list open-licensing@helixcommunity.org. The parent post is largely incorrect.

Documentation on using the gtk helix widget

Info on our awesome mp3 decoder

mp3 codec source (fixed and floating point)

For the real scoop on licensing, contact the public mailing list open-licensing@helixcommunity.org. The parent post is largely incorrect.

Ogg support is available for the windows RealPlayer from http://xiph.helixcommunity.org. Unfortunately, the player won't autoinstall them for you, but you can copy them by hand.

This makes Helix player "the best choice" by default since no open source alternative can legally exist. (thanks to patents and what not)

Er, I thought the newer realplayer releases were based on some kind of open-source Helix player?

Slashdot readers, if you're going to bash Real for wanting to distribute "proprietary" products that are based on open-source projects that they help develop or fund, then please also do not endorse the following:

* OpenOffice (Sun)
* Mozilla (Netscape)
* Evolution, Gaim (Novell)
* Quanta (TheKompany)
* Perl, Python, Tcl (ActiveState)
* Red Hat, SuSE, and most other commercial Linux distributions

Thank you.

I am very new to video encoding, but was very happy to see that the h.264 codec is freely available for both noncommercial and commercial use, according to the licensing agreement. Took me a second to find the page again, but here it is: https://helixcommunity.org/2002/intro/commercial-l icense/client

Research & Development Use License

RPSL: No cost
RCSL: No cost

Commercial Use License
RPSL: No cost
RCSL:

h.264 kicks ass.

you won't find an MP3 player in Debain main

You sir are wrong.

Debian includes several MP3 players, but no MP3 *encoders*. To rip to MP3 on Debian, you must download the sources and compile the ripper yourself.

I hope that this makes it into the Helix Player, which has RPMs (convertable to debs via alien).

Well, Helix is available under an (OSI certified) open source licence. Only the Real Audio/Video codecs are binary only. Parts of it are also available under the GPL. See https://helixcommunity.org/content/licenses

The licence file says
Helix DNA Technology Binary Research Use License
REDISTRIBUTION NOT PERMITTED

Rad Complete license.

If AOL would open the WinAmp source, after it was examined by a horde of cranky Slashdotters bent on porting it to Linux, it would be at least believed to be less buggy than WMP.

I'm not so sure that belief would necessarily follow:

Final versions are available of the 100% open source Helix Player & RealPlayer 10 for Linux, with RealAudio & RealVideo 10 and MP3 support.

Admittedly, this might have more to do with the vocal contingent who hate Real than /.ers who can/do read source and be swayed by it...

There's a free software linux-based firmware for this device here:
http://www.turtlehead.co.uk/downloads/Wmamp-0.3.zi p
Great hacking potential for putting something like helix on it, and taking the pc out of the picture altogether :)
wmamp.img: Linux Compressed ROM File System data

The answer to the first question, taken literally, is "yes, obviously". Presuming you really mean "anyone" as a casual way of saying for "a very large portion of the general market" then the answer right now is "no". But...

Does *nix really think it a chance in the desktop sector considering how entrenched Windows is?

This is a different question altogether, and the answer is "yes".

See, most people really DON'T care what OS brand name they use so much as they care about being able to play well with others - whether the "others" are other computer environments that the user is already familiar with, or other people playing the user's favorite game, or websites on the internet and email clients on their friend's computer, or being able to look at the slideshows that someone else produced and uploaded, or whatever...

Most people also don't want to blow wads of money on licensing if they don't have to.

The "typical" computer user these days seems to be interested almost entirely in email, web browsing, and "Mahjong" games. These basic functions are already well supported in *nix environments and ready to be sold as "appliances" running *nix to anyone who is satisfied with those basic requirements. Related to email and web, though, people also want to be able to watch all those little internet videos that their friends email to them, which are often in proprietary formats. Now, MPlayer already supports all of the major formats pretty well, and plugins are available to use it to play internet videos in Microsoft(r)'s formats, Apple(r) Quicktime(tm), and so forth, not to mention the existence of the Helix media player as well. So, that's possible to take care of.

The slideshows (I refuse to call it a "presentation" when there is nobody actually presenting...), word-processor documents, and spreadsheets can all be handled pretty well by OpenOffice. There are still a few formatting differences that come up sometimes when loading a file produced by a Microsoft(r) program, but I'd call it "good enough for typical home use". Plus, the ability to generate .pdf's natively built in means if someone is USING OpenOffice they can generate documents that look correct on everyone's computers. So, for ordinary home users, this is also at a "good enough" stage.

That's not all of the market, or I think even a majority, but it's a pretty big chunk. What's really missing, as the Slashdot discussion boards echo loudly with every time this subject comes up, is video games. Right now, most are written exclusively for the purpose of being installed on a Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) general-purpose operating system, and this does create a genuine speedbump in the path of *nix desktop marketshare.

However, the concept of having a dedicated "boot disk" for running a video game has been around for a very long time. Tech support people tend to love them, because when used, the video game in question ends up running on a known, well-characterized environment without other processes interfering. Because providing tech support costs money, software company tend to love anything that reduces the need for tech support.

Since it seems like most people who are playing anything more intensive than "Mahjong" or "Solitaire" usually play full-screen and dedicating all of their attention to the game (and generally want as little running in the background reducing their framerates as possible), the possibility of distributing videogames on self-contained boot CD's is very real. The boot disk might be a no-license-fee-paid-by-the-software-company Linux disk, as they've talked about doing (have already done?) with America's Army. I think the only technical capability lacking to make this really feasible is full write support for NTFS (since

They also added HelixPlayer (Real), Synaptics and now you can use Java *almost* out-of-the-box.

Certainly a good 'partner' to support ... compared to companies like Real ...

Is there no end to British ass kissers ? Real already has their open-source player in https://player.helixcommunity.org/ for almost a year now, if not more. The stable version (realone player 1.0 for unix/linux) is already out. And all bbc has got is the promise of a codec that they themselves admit: "A lot remains to be done to convert our promising algorithm and experimental implementation into practical useable code. This includes optimization so that it can decode in real time. Algorithmic enhancements are needed to improve the compression performance still further. The resulting codec needs to be integrated with other parts of a compression system such as players, and interfaced using standard IO formats."

Dah... Move on.

Don't worry. Audio/Video chat is currently being implemented in the Psi jabber client using Jabber/Helix. It shouldn't take too long before it's finished.

What to do if you find yourself with a computer that's unable to play Realaudio, and you're at your wits' end with no hope of HHGTTG:

Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far.

Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which, given your current circumstances is more likely:

Consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

...right here.

It's powered by GForge, so it's backed by PHP and PostgreSQL.

There are a bunch of other sites running GForge listed here...

1. Log in
   
2. Visit the Helix Player bug tracker tab
   
3. Click on "Enter a new report"
   

1. Log in
   
2. Visit the Helix Player bug tracker tab
   
3. Click on "Enter a new report"
   

1. Log in
   
2. Visit the Helix Player bug tracker tab
   
3. Click on "Enter a new report"
   

Hi folks,

I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.

I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.

There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.

As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.

We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL

If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.

It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.

At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.

Rob

Hi folks,

I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.

I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.

There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.

As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.

We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL

If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.

It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.

At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.

Rob

Hi folks,

I'm Rob Lanphier, and I'm the Development Support Manager for RealNetworks. Among other things, I'm responsible for guiding our Helix Community initiative.

I'm glad to see some of the good comments here. People are starting to see that things have have changed.

There's been some comments on ethics, and how a company "can never be trusted again" after making missteps. It's very frustrating for me personally because it belies a certain naivete about how companies and the world works, as well as the fact that the meme really limits the potential of doing some really great things. It also bugs me because, well, I like to think of myself as a very ethical person.

As Jamie Zawinski pointed out, you get a lot of people together, and stupidity inevitably ensues. It's practically unavoidable. However, there's also an upside to getting a lot of people together. Some things just take a lot of people to do.

We're building out an infrastructure for delivering music and other media to a lot of folks over the Internet, and building the partnerships with media companies and technology companies to pull it off. In the process of doing that, we're managing to build a lot of great technology that we're making available as open source, much of it even GPL

If we're successful in really getting the industry to rally around this infrastructure, not only will the world have a kickass open source media infrastructure, but we'll have shown other previously skeptical that it's not an utterly insane thing to do. However, if it doesn't work out, it'll be yet another counterexample of why building open source isn't compatible with the business world.

It's been really cool to see how the Helix Player/RealPlayer for Linux effort has gone. Our Freshmeat ranking continues to climb at a great pace, and we're seeing a lot of downloads. If anyone is worried about what's in that player, look at the source code. Hopefully, we'll be able to further roll that model of building software out to other parts of our business.

At the end of the day, companies are just people. You get a big enough group together, and you'll find there's good people, and there's bad people. I suppose you can lump us all together, and say that the group as a whole is bad. Or you can take the more pragmatic approach. Rally behind the good people in the group, and help them guide the rest down the right path.

Rob

How about opening up the .rm format first so that I can use any player I want. Then we can talk on the same terms.

Umm... done.

Sadly, they've done exactly what you are talking about, but somehow Apple is the good guy anyway. Just goes to show that being cool is sometimes more important than being right.

Yup, it's quite been good lately (well, the open source linux client anyway). You can download it here

HTH

Jedidiah

Linux PPC version is available here:

https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/downloads/
https://helixcommunity.org/projects/player

Linux PPC version is available here:

https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/downloads/
https://helixcommunity.org/projects/player

It's being fixed:

http://lists.helixcommunity.org/pipermail/player-d ev/2004-July/000617.html

Do note though that while player is MPEG4 capable, and an MPEG4 implementation is also available - it is not bundled with the player by default. It is likely that distros that qualify and ship the RealPlayer will include MPEG4.
https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/unix/help/p layerfaq.html#mozTocId117659
--
Vikram Dendi
Program Manager & Project Lead
Helix/Real Players

Do note though that while player is MPEG4 capable, and an MPEG4 implementation is also available - it is not bundled with the player by default. It is likely that distros that qualify and ship the RealPlayer will include MPEG4.
https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/unix/help/p layerfaq.html#mozTocId117659
--
Vikram Dendi
Program Manager & Project Lead
Helix/Real Players

... you can always fill this out and take a look at it yourself. Of course, you can't distribute or sell a product with that technology seperate from "Helix DNA" unless you work something out with them.

Speaking of Real and QuickTime, I was just made aware of this little gem a couple of days ago. It allows you to export movies to Real format from within QuickTime Player Pro. Now if there were only a decoder component, I could toss Real Player for good...

It's on the vorbis.com and helix community main pages - Helix now has support for both Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. See Here.
-ReK

Thank you. The focus for 1.0 of the player is to create a simple and fast player that focused on stability and ease-of-use than a multitude of features. We are close to realizing this goal. What we would love is for feedback from you and the many other users as to what you would like to see in the future. -- Vikram Dendi Program Manager and Project Lead Helix Player Project

No, it's not "doomed to fail" any more than MySQL is "doomed to fail" (which switched from LGPL to GPL, IIRC). Having a means of charging for making proprietary applications means that all people who modify/augment and distribute also contribute one way or another. Either they contribute by making their application open source (adding to the ecosystem), or they contribute financially by licensing the code. In any case, they help perpetuate the platform.

It sucks that we have to compete on so many fronts, but we've been doing it for 9 years in the face of many, many pundits talking about how we're "doomed to fail".

We've gotten tremendous traction in the embedded software space. Many, many, many handset makers have licensed Helix for use in their devices. We have a strong lead in the nascent Linux mobile space with our deal with Motorola. With our announcements today, we're making a great start into the Linux desktop space.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Well, here's the download page.
Christ, that was one second on google, why couldn't you have just done that rather then go on a stupid rant?

Especially since Microsoft will not allow the codec to be included in installs ever.

Well, you never know. If they lose the appeal on the EU antitrust case, they may a least be forced to ship RealPlayer in that jurisdiction.

And RealPlayer plays Theora. :-)

That's the nice thing about being the right choice.

Especially since Microsoft will not allow the codec to be included in installs ever.

Well, you never know. If they lose the appeal on the EU antitrust case, they may a least be forced to ship RealPlayer in that jurisdiction.

And RealPlayer plays Theora. :-)

That's the nice thing about being the right choice.