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My claims? Considering Apple uses RTSP for it's Quicktime streaming it would only make sense for them to use the thing they know for their other products. Any more proof? Shall I telnet to port 554 on my Airport Express and show you the RTSP signature? How about a Apple Press Release in which they updated RTSP in the Airport firmware. I'm sure Apple always updates protocols not supported by their hardware!

If Apple didn't like it and wanted to be proprietary, they wouldn't have used Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), which is a well documented and supported protocol, as the transport method.

Here are some videos from C-SPAN that might be useful for coming up with questions for Badnarik. It's always more interesting to question people about things they've actually said!

Third Party Debate

Badnarik's Acceptance Speech

Libertarian Party Agenda

LP Canidates Debate

All these links are RTSP, so you need some kind of special client for them. I personally was not able to watch them online (I did catch them on TV though). If someone knows of a location of MPEG2 or AVI+MPEG4 encodings that would be better than special protocols that don't seem to work with the linux clients I've tried.

And the Streambox guys did it by reverse-engineering the protocol.

I've got a similar product. On the off-chance the Gateway also uses RTSP, these might point you somewhere useful.

Getting the code is admittedly more complicated than it needs to be (and we're working on that), but hyperbole like the parent post should not be modded up as "Informative". The steps are:

1. Sign up for the site, filling in a form with proposed user name, real name, company name, and email.
2. Receive confirmation URL, and visit included URL
3. Agree to site terms of use
4. Agree to RPSL (an OSI certified license)
5. Get source code via CVS/SSH

Why are we being hardasses about making sure that people agree to licenses? It's a combination of the way the legal system works, and our general conservativeness that stems from being a publicly traded company.

There are good reasons to ensure that "manifestation of assent" occurs, even for open source. I'll defer to Larry Rosen's excellent paper on the topic. Larry, as you may know, is the General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative, and while his opinion is only an opinion, it's a very well informed one.

As for the functionality, it's more than just "shells". There's complete software there, and it's the foundation of our commercial products. Additionally, the combination of Ogg Vorbis, SMIL 2.0, JPEG, GIF, and PNG is very powerful, and *all open source*. No RealAudio/RealVideo necessary, and the app is pretty unique. For an example which plays in the Helix Player (and versions of RealPlayer/RealOne Player with the Ogg Vorbis codec installed), check out the following link:

http://rtsp.org/2003/demos/oggsmil/oggdemo.smil

Once one starts looking at SMIL (especially SMIL 2.0), you begin to realize that a system that can support it does a lot.

Rob Lanphier
Helix Community Coordinator

The headline should be "3GPP Becoming Mobile-Phone Standard", and it's not all that surprising, but it's very good news for everyone (including RealNetworks, where I'm from). We've been doing a lot of work in the 3GPP, and it's great to see that work paying dividends. If you really want to find out what this stuff is about, look at the spec (and yes, I hate the fact that these are Word docs in zipfiles as much as anyone).

Much of the confusion around this subject comes from a lack of understanding of the difference between .mov, .mp4, and .3gp. DoCoMo's announcement was good news for 3GPP, and given the support throughout the Helix platform for 3GPP formats, codecs, and protocols, we view it as great news for the Helix Community.

As another poster pointed out, only a piece of 3GPP is based on Quicktime is the container file format itself (the bit that says "here's a 3000 byte chunk of data with this 32bit codec identifier"). Another piece (the protocol) is based on work RealNetworks pioneered (RTSP). Moreover, the Helix DNA Client supports the 3GPP specification today.

RealNetworks added MPEG-4 and 3GPP support 10 months ago with the RealSystem Mobile Server (see press release),
and MPEG-4 support will be included in the Helix DNA Server when it is released in the near future.

As for the speculation about Apple releasing 3GPP encoding support, we would welcome them to the party. In early November we announced that a version of our Producer product for creating 3GPP content will ship in Q1 of 03. (see press release) Moreover, we offer our encoding framework as open source (and naturally open APIs) so that you can add support for whatever format you want to. We've given you a head start by implementing Ogg Vorbis support.

Again, the new phones sound great. Lots of new devices for Helix encoders and servers to work with.

I've also been disappointed with the lack of uptake on BEEP. It's a very cool concept.

BEEP is Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (RFC 3080). More details can be found at here.

When we were designing RTSP, we looked for something like this, and at the time, the options weren't very appealing. We ended up using HTTP as a quasi-base protocol. I think it was the best solution at the time, but had BEEP been available, we'd have used it in a heartbeat.

"rtsp://" protocol, something only realnetworks software can understand

Wrong. RTSP is an open protocol. You can read RFC2326 here. Multiple implementations already exist, including an open-source one.

"rtsp://" protocol, something only realnetworks software can understand

Wrong. RTSP is an open protocol. You can read RFC2326 here. Multiple implementations already exist, including an open-source one.