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Real finally figured it out... someday, Macromedia may figure out the power of flexability.

Helix Player has the flexibility to add any media format that other players can play. It's a matter of writing a renderer/fileformat plugin. This is how theora & vorbis support happened.

-- Vikram Dendi Program Manager & Project Lead Helix/Real Players for Unix

Helix Player has the flexibility to add any media format that other players can play. It's a matter of writing a renderer/fileformat plugin. This is how theora & vorbis support happened.

-- Vikram Dendi Program Manager & Project Lead Helix/Real Players for Unix

• Ogg Theora + SMIL 2.0 support. Sure, there are other players out there that support Ogg Theora, and support SMIL 2.0, but I'm not aware of any that support both.
• Highly modular architecture that scales down to fit on cell phones and other portable devices. We post numbers for the Symbian build, but the Linux numbers aren't far off.
• Array of industry partnerships. Why does this matter? Because we're getting more commerical licensees all of the time, and even for commercial licensees, we're making sure that the work that they do gets contributed back into the codebase, even if they are a commercial licensee (see section 2.2) and are otherwise terrified of this whole open source thang.
• Platform support - we support Win32, MacOS, Linux, Symbian very well, and a range of other operating systems to the point that those third parties can make it work on their platforms.
• A stable company with lots of money in the bank and growing revenues. Our last earnings announcement has more on this.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

• Ogg Theora + SMIL 2.0 support. Sure, there are other players out there that support Ogg Theora, and support SMIL 2.0, but I'm not aware of any that support both.
• Highly modular architecture that scales down to fit on cell phones and other portable devices. We post numbers for the Symbian build, but the Linux numbers aren't far off.
• Array of industry partnerships. Why does this matter? Because we're getting more commerical licensees all of the time, and even for commercial licensees, we're making sure that the work that they do gets contributed back into the codebase, even if they are a commercial licensee (see section 2.2) and are otherwise terrified of this whole open source thang.
• Platform support - we support Win32, MacOS, Linux, Symbian very well, and a range of other operating systems to the point that those third parties can make it work on their platforms.
• A stable company with lots of money in the bank and growing revenues. Our last earnings announcement has more on this.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

• Ogg Theora + SMIL 2.0 support. Sure, there are other players out there that support Ogg Theora, and support SMIL 2.0, but I'm not aware of any that support both.
• Highly modular architecture that scales down to fit on cell phones and other portable devices. We post numbers for the Symbian build, but the Linux numbers aren't far off.
• Array of industry partnerships. Why does this matter? Because we're getting more commerical licensees all of the time, and even for commercial licensees, we're making sure that the work that they do gets contributed back into the codebase, even if they are a commercial licensee (see section 2.2) and are otherwise terrified of this whole open source thang.
• Platform support - we support Win32, MacOS, Linux, Symbian very well, and a range of other operating systems to the point that those third parties can make it work on their platforms.
• A stable company with lots of money in the bank and growing revenues. Our last earnings announcement has more on this.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Thanks for including the 'Splintering' link. In it I see a very good point made by Rob which you have convieniently glossed over (or perhaps it is the myopia of a linux dev);

"...We're looking for integration into GNOME, but we're also looking at producing a world-class, *cross-platform* multimedia system, and we've got to focus on the one we've got (Helix). While it's theoretically possible to port GStreamer to Windows, Mac OS, and Symbian (for example), it's *done* for Helix."

Why doesn't GStreamer work on Windows or Mac?

A published HelixSDK, not just the Producer SDK, might go a long way towards this mutually beneficial collaboration you speak of, regardless of platform.

The source code + binary add-ons for the RealPlayer 10 alpha for Linux are available from our CVS repository, and will be available soon as a tarball.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

The source code + binary add-ons for the RealPlayer 10 alpha for Linux are available from our CVS repository, and will be available soon as a tarball.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

We are also working on getting the powerpc build of helixplayer for those who run linux on their ppcs. We need some help on that front though.

https://helixcommunity.org/project/showfiles.php?g roup_id=154

This FAQ talks about this differentiation in detail.

(from my earlier submission to s.) Here are a few screenshots of the Alpha.

(from my earlier submission to s.) Here are a few screenshots of the Alpha.

(from my earlier submission to s.) Here are a few screenshots of the Alpha.

(from my earlier submission to s.) Here are a few screenshots of the Alpha.

We appreciate you pointing out the fix to the problem. However, contrary to popular belief, just because we're a "big" company, we don't have infinite army of developers to apply to this, and one of the things that drives us crazy about Linux right now is the practically infinite combination of compilers, libraries, and so on that all tend to break backwards compatibility on a frequent basis. With respect to company size, I say "big" because in the grand scheme of things, IBM, Sun, Microsoft and Cisco are big companies. We, on the other hand, are not (under 1000 employees).

As far as "make install" goes, we're not using automake, so we don't have that system. We've got our own build system that we've been using since 1996 (well before open sourcing). Though it's not what folks are used to, it is open source as well, and it's very powerful in its own right. It's written in Python, and it's religiously cross platform, capable of generating GNU make make files, as well as Visual C++ nmake files, CodeWarrior build files, etc.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Moreover, the Helix DNA Producer (also open source) has the sort of pipelining functionality you are talking about.

Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks

It's not just windows, the various unices (including *BSD, and linux on non x86 platforms) are also not as well supported as I would like them to be. I've looked into porting helix to Irix - it can be persuaded to compile with some effort - but I find their ribosome build-system not very encouraging to say the least.

https://helixcommunity.org/content/rpsl

Open source or free software? An evaluation would be nice.

The Helix(TM) DNA Client is the universal playback engine designed to support the decode and playback of any data type desired ... The Helix DNA Client is designed as an open, comprehensive platform that enables playback of digital media products and applications for any format, operating system, or device. [It] supports any audio or video codec through well-defined file format and decoder APIs.

They don't.

You mean Helix.. I'm still cautiously optimistic about it though.

There is close co-ordination between the mac team and the linux team which I hope will show in the ease of use of both products.

-V
--
Vikram Dendi
Program Manager (Linux and Mac Players)

Hi Ricin,

Sorry you had trouble getting in touch with the community. The best place to discuss player issues is the player development list, which you can subscribe to here.

We enthusiastically accept all help from the community. If you don't hear back from us, it's likely because we didn't get your message.

As to your comments on gtk-2.4, we're targeting gtk-2.0 as our development platform, as we need to be able to function on older versions of gnome.

Some of the gtk that is in gtk-2.0 is indeed deprecated in gtk-2.4, but it still exists. gtk 2.4 is binary backwards compatible with 2.0.

I've done much of the gtk work, both in the community with the helixcommunity guiplayer, and more recently as an employee of RealNetworks on the HelixPlayer. If you have concerns about the way we're using gtk, feel free to contact me at rgammon@real.com, or the player list at dev@player.helixcommunity.org

Hi Ricin,

Sorry you had trouble getting in touch with the community. The best place to discuss player issues is the player development list, which you can subscribe to here.

We enthusiastically accept all help from the community. If you don't hear back from us, it's likely because we didn't get your message.

As to your comments on gtk-2.4, we're targeting gtk-2.0 as our development platform, as we need to be able to function on older versions of gnome.

Some of the gtk that is in gtk-2.0 is indeed deprecated in gtk-2.4, but it still exists. gtk 2.4 is binary backwards compatible with 2.0.

I've done much of the gtk work, both in the community with the helixcommunity guiplayer, and more recently as an employee of RealNetworks on the HelixPlayer. If you have concerns about the way we're using gtk, feel free to contact me at rgammon@real.com, or the player list at dev@player.helixcommunity.org

There is a pretty standard procedure listed on that page for how to start work on a platform or port to a new platform. I am sorry to hear that you had contacted folks in hc.org and didn't get any response. This might have been around the time when hc.org moved platforms (to Gforge now). Can you forward the email to me at vikram(at)helixcommunity.org? We would love to have you as part of the community.
-V

Okay. I was hoping the GM would post info than that, so I'll pry.

I went here , and browsed around on the page for a bit. It will definitely be interesting to see, but why all the proprietary codecs? FFmpeg looks a lot more like what is needed for Linux at this point. We've got media players out the wazoo already, its the codecs that are the big problem. The server/producer stuff looks very interesting though.

Wrong. I can trivially encode to MP3 using iTunes (I have done so for hundreds of files) and transfer to my player of choice. They only need to use a flash card or support the Mac connectivity-wise, for instance, mounting like one of those USB pen drives. (Rio Karma is touted on some posts as being Mac compatible as well).

If you use Real's offerings, you need to have your head examined. There aren't very many players out there supporting Real's file type.

Agreed.

Strangely enough... Microsoft's the one coming to the plate offering a competitive environment. WMA is the most popular "secure media" media format among the players being reviewed.

Misleading. "Popular" only on the sense of being supported by the majority of players but not in the top seller (iPod). I could not care less about hundreds of crappy players made in the East (no offense) that only a few buy.

There's several music stores competiting for your business on a song-by-song basis, with Wal*Mart as low as 88 cents a song and BuyMusic as low as 79 cents for hit songs, blowing Apple's 99 cent offer out of the water.

Well, that is debatable, but other non-tangible stuff comes to play here: available collection, collection size, collection selection quality, ease of use, compatibility with the top-seller hardware (iPod), etc. BuyMusic? You gotta be kidding.

Also... Microsoft has the most exposed API. If you want to build your own application to control your digital jukebox, Microsoft has a full SDK for its Windows Media Player 9 Series, with a powerful ActiveX object and the ability to go deeper if you want to.

Yeah, I have not examined MS's WM9 SDK in any detail. However, Microsoft has a proven trackrecord of changing technologies, providing moving-target-APIs and mercilessly killing off small companies whenever it is strategically or economically advantageous for them. You have been warned. You can go that way, but you are at a real risk of eventually withering or OEMizing yourself to another wannabe that is slowly out-Delled to finally die (Gateway anyone?), good luck.

Real has no open API for playing its scrambled files

Somewhat false. You could have mentioned the somewhat-OSS-like Helix Initiative, I do not particularly like them, but credit's where credit's due. Have you downloaded their source code and examined it in any detail? I have.

Apple's is only available to C++ programs with a lot of time on their hands

Downright nonsense. Somewhat vague sentence... care to mention any specific evidence on that? You have worked in Objective-C, the Foundation classes and the IOKit yourself? Cool, enlighten us on its non-RAD characteristics but expect some informed resistance.

(Posting anonymously as I have MPs)

I thought LFNW was awesome. I especially enjoyed the Pacific Northwest National Labs High Performance Linux Cluster talk given by Timothy A Witteveen of PNL. It is one hell of a machine. It is one hell of a machine. 9.4 teraflops and a 53 terrabyte SAN running NWLinux. It placed 5th on the last Top 500 List.

That 53 terrabyte SAN is one contiguous filesystem using lustre. The use of QSNet2/Elan4 interconnects make the use of terbyte data sets with lots of internode communication more efficient than past machines. These interconnects provide a peak bandwidth of 340 MB/sec in each direction. But even more impresive than the bandwidth is the latency, between 2 us and 5 us. Compare that with ethernet latency measured in tens or even hundreds of ms.

During the presentation Tim went over two examples of simulations performed on their cluster that could not be accomplished on other machines. These examples were outside of my domain of knowledge, but one involved simulating the behavior of water molecules and the other was an extremely detailed protein folding simulation.

One last bit that was interesting was their methodology for updating the machines. They have over a thousand and took some time to determine an efficient means to keep the machines up to date. It was determined that reimaging the maches was faster than applying patches. They utilize a multicast approach in which allows them, theoretically, to reimage all of the machines in 28 minutes. They do not always reach this theoretical maximum, but they reimage a thousand machines PDQ.

The meet & greet in the commons was fun. Pogo Linux had a free drawing for a loaded AMD64 system. There was plenty of swag to be had from all sorts of folks. It was cool to stop and chat with one of the Helix developers. All in all there was a really good group of folks gathered.

I know Slashdot is full of trolls, but I must say I am a little suprised at how many crappy comments LFNW is getting. All I have to say to those filled with negativity is screw you. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have some cool stuff going on. Whether it is the 3 new lugs in Seattle, OSDL in Portland, the Linux Cluster at PNL, SeattleWireless, PersonalTelco or LFNW there are exciting things happening up here. I think a couple people on this site need to take their heads out of their arses and take a look around. Folks up here are using linux, and getting stuff done.

You can get Vorbis and Theora plugins for RealPlayer 10 from the Helix Xiph project. These are alpha quality plugins and work pretty well. If you find any bugs with the plugins you can submit them to the bug tracker and I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible. Aaron

Real Helix nightly builds 'n tarballs goodness/
It looks like this will be RealPlayer 11. I am not sure how usable the code is at the moment though...

To be honest, I've not been actively reading gaming mags, so I can't say exactly how poorly gamers view the N-Gage.

However, one German IT site reviewed it in November and gave it a failing grade because it wasn't good at either gaming or a cell phone.

They also report that a German discount chain sold the N-Gage starting April 1 for 159 EUR, without contract binding. It sounds like Nokia is trying to clear out their stock to make way for the new, cheaper version that has fixed a number of flaws that the previous version had: sidetalking, 4k colors, etc.

I don't think that it's much of a liability that there's no MP3 player included: the comments on the original article pointed out that there is one available.

Now, on a more offbeat note, if it indeed were the case that N-Gages were popular among child molesters, it would mean that N-Gages are popular among young people. It would not necessarily mean that such creeps like it for themselves. At any rate, I doubt a headline like that would ever make it to press, because there would be enough positive headlines to fend off a stupid attack like that. Come to think of it, I suppose 9 out of 10 child molesters agree that computers are an absolute necessity. And the internet, too. But that doesn't make either computers or the internet unpopular. But we do know how often people like that get caught by undercover police officers.

All in all, I think that Nokia is doing the right thing with this revision and that they have a chance to make right what they messed up last time.

What I want is something I can use under Linux that'll produce movie files that RealOne on my N-Gage will play.

Syncing I can't help with because I don't properly use any computer-based PIM. Voice Dialing, I haven't gotten around to sorting out, but I'm guessing you need a Bluetooth headset for it to work. Love to be proved wrong though.

For MP3, just download the Helix player for the S60.

At the player project on helixcommunity you should be able to find an early milestone build for Solaris on Sparc.
Downloads
The Solaris x86 build is still being worked on in the community, and your help will be greatly appreciated. You can see the status of HelixPlayer on several platforms here:
Platforms

At the player project on helixcommunity you should be able to find an early milestone build for Solaris on Sparc.
Downloads
The Solaris x86 build is still being worked on in the community, and your help will be greatly appreciated. You can see the status of HelixPlayer on several platforms here:
Platforms

They are a public station, and they aren't even considering Ogg Vorbis, and/or Icecast?

If we can't get even the public stations on board with free and open standards, how will we ever get those standards to spread?

Anyone who lives in the area served by that public station, please write them a letter, and ask them to look into using Ogg/Icecast. Then, instead of providing a link to the Real player, they can provide a link to Winamp. Or even Zinf.

Or maybe even Real's player. I found a bunch of old news items (from 2002) saying that Real was on board with Ogg Vorbis, and the RealOne player would play Ogg Vorbis. And it looks like the new Helix player supports Vorbis. Does Real do a good job now of playing Ogg streams? (The icecast.org web site does not list the Real players as an option, but I suppose it's possible that the web site is out of date.)

And if Real is smart, they will make their player work to play Icecast streams. I'd say the same about Microsoft and Windows Media Player, but I'll bet they can't resist the urge to try to throw roadblocks in the way of the competition.

steveha

The Helix player (which is somehow subsidiary to Real) handles RealPlayer 10 files and is open source. Here is a link to their web page.

Real's Helix player (player.helixcommunity.org) ought to do just fine.

Careful there. According to their license description page, while the player itself may be under an OSI-approved license, it appears that their codecs are not:

RealAudio/RealVideo Porting License - for your convenience, this porting and optimization license gives you source code access to portions of the Helix platform which haven't been open sourced, such as RealAudio and RealVideo.

Whether this is acceptable or not is up to each user. Although I wouldn't touch it, some people may be comfortable with this arrangement. However, it still isn't Open Source in any reasonable sense.

Let me get this straight.

1. They start working heavily with the open source community through Helix, including making a free Linux player that handles real (which, btw, is probably where the people who made the Real Alternative got the material to make the codecs).
2. They remove the bloat and ads from their software as a direct result of people's complaints. Not only that, they let you turn off all their popups. Name 3 other free closed source softwares that allow you to do that.
3. They're working with the Doom9 community, which is probably the biggest internet community about audio/video matters.

And none of this is good enough? Christ, that's as pig-headed as idiots who keep chanting that Linux is just a hobbiest server OS and will never be useful on the desktop.

For the record, I hated Real too, but since they seem to be genuinely giving it a real effort, I figured I'd give them another try. So I downloaded and installed Real 10 just now. Fiding the free download off their website was trivial -- it was in big bold blue letters on the side of their downloads page. Who would have trouble finding *that*? Yah, it's not as big as the big graphic showing their pay version, but hey, they have employees to pay. Get over it.

Install was easy -- It did ask to take over all my media files, but I just turned them off, then went into advanced, and turned on DVD playback for Real -- Real does a much better job on DVDs than WMP, for sure. Only other annoyance during install was they asked me to register. This is not unlike other media players that I use regularly, so I did. A quick click to turn off the popups from their quick-launch app, and I'm done. Not exactly the nightmare of previous Real installations.

So yeah. I can see people complaining about Real because of what they did in the past, but jesus, they're giving it an honest effort here, and remember, any time Real wins, Microsoft LOSES. =)

Tried Helix Player? It's certainly not very far into development, but it's lightweight and still full functional...better than pretty much anything else out there that plays Real (even on Windows), in my opinion. And as you might notice, it's sponsored by Real.

MS2.1 had problems playing back non-realaudio/realvideo datatypes -- if you need these, M2 is a better bet.

Nightly builds are also available -- see the player webpage for details.

MS2.1 had problems playing back non-realaudio/realvideo datatypes -- if you need these, M2 is a better bet.

Nightly builds are also available -- see the player webpage for details.

If Slashdot is posting stories about every Series 60 app released nearly a month ago, see you all in a moonth to discuss the new Helix client.

I find it very dishonest that you claim Realmedia players are not available for Linux and Solaris.

Go get the new Helix Player for Linux. It is much better IMO then RP8. Just grab the MS2.1 RPM and it will install the plugins for your browser. You can also run it manually by running hxplay.

Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks

Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks