Slashdot Mirror
RealPlayer 7 Beta for Linux
Dobromir Montauk wrote to us to say that Real has released the new RealPlayer 7 beta for glibc 2.0. The installation seems to be nicer than the last one, with support of mime types amongst other improvements. Now, if it doesn't crash my browser, we'll be getting somewhere.
Okay, this begs the question:
Who is " Natalie Portman ?"
What relation does Ms. Portman have to hot grits?
Why do you have this infintile fatuation with "Natalie Portman" and "hot grits?"
Why don't you consider your own Natalie Portman site where you may indulge your fatuation, safely out of the site of Slashdot users.
Didn't you read???
> new RealPlayer 7 beta for glibc 2.0
maybe you might want to think about updating those ancient libraries.
It is nice that they at least recognize the SPARC version of Solaris. I agree that is it depressing that they are avoiding IRIX and the other platforms that both Netscape and the Open Sound System is available for. However, I think your wrong about SGI moving to Linux for the workstation. I went to the SGI Linux "University" Road-tour where they had a guy from Intel give the keynote. What SGI and Intel was pushing was Linux on IA-64. Everything else that SGI was talking about (Samba, Journal File System, Clustering, Security, etc.) suggest that SGI doesn't see Linux being a workstation anytime soon. If I recall correctly, the Intel guy even made some crack about Linux maybe being ready for the workstation around the same time that Intel is ready to target IA-64 for the high-end workstation market in 3 to 4 years. He then went on about the Intel PR about how much better IA-64 is than previous Intel processors (just as the orginial pentium does floating point ten times faster than the Intel 486... but then again, the i486 got the floating point right... oops!). A comparison between IA-64 and MIPS was never presented. Based on the SGI presentation, I would guess if you contact your SGI sales rep anytime in the next couple years for a high-end workstation, they will still be pushing IRIX on ya. It will be interesting to see if Real even puts out an encoder that will take advantage of IA-64 Linux.
I found that setting ThreadedAudio=1 in my .RealNetworks_RealMediaSDK_60 file increased performance dramatically. Now MP3 and other high bitrate stuff works great.
Anybody experiencing horrible mp3 playback under this version? The music skips a lot on my system. I'm using an sblive if that is a factor.
There are some minor difficulties with getting the Netscape plugin installed on Unix. In general I'd say it is much easier to write a Netscape plugin for Windows or Macintosh. The installer does try to set it up for you, but my suspicion is that it may not work on everyone's system (especially if the installer can't find your Netscape's plugins directory.)
I can say from personal experience that I have used it to watch videos on CNN just fine.
I think there may be a readme that has some detailed information about setting up the RealPlayer7 Netscape plugin.
Can't wait til some class action or something actually drains microsofts coffers
Welcome to Linux... we can't compete - so we will beg the government to do it.
Because us hakerz LOVE the government, right?
&sign($AC[0]);
On my system this version of RealPlayer for Linux is a lot better then the previous version. Overall I think it's pretty slick, both function-wise and appearance-wise. Double-sizing the video works just fine. A full screen mode is still missing, though. If the video isn't good, try playing back higher bandwidth content. On my system, the video looks exactly the same as in the Windows version, which depends mostly on your available bandwidth, and which bandwidth the content was created for.
It integrates well with the browser, except some minor trouble with the status display for the Netscape plugin playing back videos on abcnews.com.
For me this is one more functionality I no longer need Windows for. Now I just wish those WiMP only sites out there would care about users with other OS's than M$ Windows.
Correction- the G2 never got out of ALPHA...
For those sites that stream both Real and WiMP at the same bandwidth, I have trouble seeing or hearing much of a difference. IMHO, WiMP takes longer to connect, and fails completely more often. If you could point me to a site where you think WiMP quality is better than Real, I will definitely check it out.
I have not been keeping track of "user friendly" programs for linux as of late. If it did not run on kde, or wasn't a console app, I didn't worry about it. I have never tried to run Star Office. I have never tried any gui ide. I never had a need for these programs. So I was pleasently surprised when this new fangled Real Audio thing just worked. I was kinda ancy about nor having to compile anything, or at leasting typing "%rpm -i something" in order for this to work. But the installation was a breeze. It simply worked. It is so frickin' cool that Linux has taken leaps and bounds in the area of usability as quickly as it has. Within a couple more years people will view M$ "os's" like I used to view Win 3.11 (before I saw the light:). "Oh, your still running THAT old thing...man, get with the times...here is a RedHat 2002 CD. You just have to press it up against the side of you computer and it will install itself, consolodate your outstanding credit card debt into one low monthly payment and make you irresistable to attractive members of the opposite sex"
That's the only differense i've noticed between RealMedia and WindowsMedia... I compared 2 kinds of the same movie from NASA's shuttleweb, and the windowsMedia-one took even more space and its quality was really bad... Lots of huge pixels.
Well the lack of 'favorites' is annoying, but one that's also 'annoying' is that I get the "your bandwith is insufficent to view this content'. When I try the same site on Windows Media Player, *it will play.* Not much difference between sound quality.
:)
Arggh, I have a nice short comment all typed out and Netscape didn't crashed.
It seems to grab about 30% more cpu on my celeron 466 while playing .rm video streams than the G2 version I'd been using did, not to mention that while watching the "statistics" thingy, it seems to be playing at a much higher framerate than the video is encoded at, which i guess explains the cpu use, as well as dropping *lots* of frames.
ok, wtf is a "plugin helper soft link directory" ?
anyone?
(Jeeez)
People disguise their email addresses to prevent web-bots from harvesting lists of email addresses for spamming, but still allowing other users to figure out what the correct address should be.
The slashdot user info page kinda hints that you should do this.
Damn, the intelligent article that this was in response to has been moderated down immediately. Oh well. I'm not going to waste my effort
another thing that amazes me is the incredible lengths lamers go to to avoid having to hit the 'delete' key in their email client.
The purpose is to annoy you. And you personally.
All the tosspots that get totally fucked off and rant and rave and do dumb shit and kill people and go on crusades and fuck themself just cos they are too lazy to ignore rubbish.
Absolutely. I hate all these people who can't ignore rubbish. I think we should kill people who can't. The whole lot of them are complete psycho nutters! IF ANYONE ELSE STARTS RANTING ABOUT STUFF I WILL GO CRAZY! CRAZY I TELL YOU !!!
Old Wolf-
Many people distort their e-mail addresses in fear that people are using bots to gather e-mail addy's for spam.
I'm sorry that you had to go through so much work to write a colorful post to pose your question.
-Saxton
A popluar app for linux. Ewwww, Microsoft will get mad.
BTW: Why is it called "beta" and "final"? Shouldn't it be "beta" and "gamma"? =:-)
Actually, it should be "beta" and then "omega."
Notice I didn't say "hot grits" or "Natalie Portman."
coming soon gritspourer 7 beta for linux. it will allow you to stream open source grits down your pants. thank you.
But the plugin is useless, if you want to have stable Netscape, you have to use libc 5 version. But since this plugin is based on glibc, it gives a bus error. I'll stick to xswallow and realplayer combination.
Why don't you try it and see???
There was a mistake in the documentation for the realplayer g2 beta (as it is the windows/mac docs). When you set realplayer up as a helper application you need to place a %u after the application i.e. /usr/bin/realplay %u to get it to work (the %u provides the url for realplayer).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but RealPlayer has been using the .rpm file extension ever since they first shipped their Netscape plugin, which was before RedHat used the .rpm extension for their packages.
Besides, you can always right-click on a file in your browser in order to save it. I know you have to spend a few extra calories to select the "save" option from the right-click menu, but oh well... that's what happens when we (referring to the Internet community in general) use something as simplistic as file extensions to identify a file's mime type.
Idiot. RPM stands for 'Redhat Package Manager'.
Yeah. JADI (Just Another Debian Idiot).
If you think MOTIF is crap, just wait till you see GTK! Har.
However, hold your horses, RealPlayer 7 looks very nice indeed.
hahahaaha !!! thanks for starting my day out with that!
one more time without using "html" carats:
adduser username;passwd username
ipchains -A input -p tcp -i ppp0 -s hostname -j DENY
Well why don't you try it? Have you ever reverse engineered anything? Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to do? Have you ever looked at a disassambled executable file? Can you make sense out of it? You need a knowledge of assembly language.
but does anyone know if it is possible to download/rip a .rm file from a site and save it on your disk. How about converting to mpeg?
i think the rp7 is a VERY big leap performance and and stableness-wise over the previous versions. i haven't noticed any stability or any other problems with the rp7 beta so far, and there is a huge improvement in audio/video quality as well and it uses very little cpu. no spambrainwashadd-pushing on the linux version either..
i for one am very pleased indeed with this one. thank you realmedia.
What was kinda funny about it was the spammer was from China and I get all these replies saying "I can't read Chinese. Please take me off your list." and here I am writing back, telling them how to read their email headers and letting them know that I don't read Chinese either.
Oh and for being a whiney, foul mouthed, dino pretending jerk you can foad for all I care.
>I think all the spambots scanning slashdot would have got pissed off
>ages ago because of all the first post trolls and left, so they are
>nothing to worry about.
No,not quite all of them. *YOU* are still here aren't you?
Does anyone know of any OS MPEG-4 projects out there? The MS asf format is usually nothing more than a bad implementatino of MPEG-4, and so it gets terrific compression to quality ratios... but there don't seem to be any true MPEG-4 software available.
MPEG-4 was designed for streaming media, and looks great from what I have seen. We need more of the standards based development to compete with RealPlayer. I wish I could do it myself, but I have other ongoing projects.
Can anyone provide a pointer to the the features of this player? Can it play any video codecs not currently available under linux. For example quicktime and mpeg4?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
>With all that beta-, unstable- or developer-versions of various
>programs around for Linux, one could think that there are almost no
>final releases.
The term "Final release" is nothing but a scam that pretty much has it's origins in the Windows (especially the Share/Crippleware) world. There ain't no such thing as a "Final Release" of software unless something bad happens to whom or whatever produces it.
Synchronization didn't work with OSS commercial in their last release (1997). Since my soundcard only works with OSS commercial this is an issue, but since my ethernet access was disabled for running Linux in a Microsoft shop, it would be nice to know if their 2000 release functions under OSS commercial before the 7 meg download finishes.
I have submitted a report to RealNetworks.
Hopefully, they will get back to me on the problem.
Fialar
On my system, rpnp.so, when placed in $HOME/.netscape/plugins (or system-wide in /usr/lib/netscape/plugins) makes Netscape die before it even begins.
/usr/local/RealPlayer7/rpnp.so /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40043000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x80000000)
ldd
libc.so.6 =>
I'm running Debian potato, with libc v2.1.3-6.
Anyone else having this problem? Is there a workaround?
Fialar
I agree with munged "antispam" email addresses being lame. Here's a few effective weapons against spam, especially when used in conjunction with eachother:
;passwd
.forward file in that account's home directory with your permanent email address.
Create a "throwaway" account with a name familiar with each forum with the command:
adduser
and add a
So, maybe in a month you will get a piece of spam. Look at the headers and see what server connected to your localhost. Add the following line in your ipchains to ban them:
ipchains -A input -p tcp -i ppp0 -s -j DENY
Put a -l at the end if you want to log future attempts.
It is another process!
What the hell are you saying Bob?
Real Network give us they new player and
you say that it will crash?
Come on.
If you dont like, dont use it!
I do, and thanks RN!
Oliver
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
RealPlayer's equivalent to ASX is SMIL, which is a W3C Recommendation, and is usually used to point to RTSP URLs (an IETF Proposed Standard, RFC 2326) and .rm files (or MP3 files, or RealPix, or GIF, or PNG, or JPEG, or whatever). .rm is a proprietary format, but we offer *lots* of standard alternatives.
In the Mac and Windows world, QuickTime tends to be the best media player option. It has a simple design and it isn't trying to suck you into any portal.
Perhaps with Apple releasing MacOS X, they'll make and intel linux port of QuickTime. The market is waiting for a good solution. Maybe using RealPlayer for linux is a good way to say "Apple, we need a linux media player!"
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Ack! Why is it that I seem to write "Octance" all the time? Sorry, it is a common typo I make.
Cheers.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Is it significant that the Real server that hosts the page is called proforma.real.com? Methinks mebbe they're not altogether sincere. Or maybe this Tootsie Roll pop is affecting me too much. :-)
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Why does it only associate mime types in KDE? It would be nice if it did Gnome, too, plus Netscape, if it's possible. It probably is. Weird.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Arggh, I had a nice long comment all typed out and Mozilla crashed. Oh well, try again.
I have windows and Linux RealPlayer on machined next to each other so we can compare the two.
The installer (and later on, RealPlayer) seems to want to bind itself to every file extension the developers could think of at the moment of release.
Yeah, see, there is this option during the install to NOT associate itself with all the file types. Same with Linux, you can choose not to install it in your mime.types.
Then, it loads a memory-hogging piece of itself to load every time you start the OS, which newbies don't know how to get rid of (or probably don't even notice).
OK, there is this option in the preferences menu to turn this off. don't know what a preferences menu is? Well, try looking around the applications menues, you should be able to find it. Still don't know, well try looking in the "Common Questions" section of the help menu, it is listed there how to turn it off. Still don't know? OK, pick up your computer and throw it out the window, you are truly too stupid to own a computer. Linux doesn't have this.
It attempts to bombard you with ads.
Hmmm...uhh...??? What ads? I just looked around at a few different realmedia streams from the Real.com site, no ads. Been using RealPlayer for several years, no ads. Are you talking about that useless content panel? Uhh, well I turn that off, it is useless after all. Don't know how to turn it off? See above.
To download the free version on the Realmedia site, you have to go through a maze of pages asking you to pay for the player.
OK, lets go visit real.com and see if we can find the cheese at the end of the maze...OK, they have ads for their pay player at the top, not surprising, they are trying to make money after all. OK, lets scroll down a little, there is a Free Real player button we can click, OK, lets click that. Oh, those bastards, asking us to buy their player again, but wait, at the bottom there is a link "RealPlayer 7 Basic is our free player". Well lets click that. OK that is it, just have to fill out that stupid form every website makes you fill out now. Wow, had to go through 2 whole pages, that is a maze? I will give you that they shouldn't have the pay player at the top when you click the free player button.
After Realmedia claimed to have fixed the "bugs" in the last version, I have seen a comment that RealPlayer quietly installs the dreaded Comet Cursor with it.
Nope, they give you an option if you want to download the Comet Cursor. I chose not to, no Comet Curosr on my machine. Linux doesn't have this.
So pretty much the only really annoying thing the Linux version is missing is the "Favorites" menu. Haven't used it enough to comment on the quality of the playback, but it looks OK so far.
Q.
Well, it's true that common sound & video system support across hardware platforms is in its' infancy on Linux (yes, I know great strides are being made, go help) BUT if Real's coders were any good it would not be a big hairy deal to compartmentalize hardware specific functions. .rpms easily on my generic Win98 PC at work because the flippin' RealPlayer grabbed the extension association. I had to hack the registry to fix this, incidentally, since I couldn't modify their association in the usual fashion. I like to use the fat pipes at work to download stuff for my home linux boxen and sneakernet the .rpms home on zip disks, it's quick and easy during off-business hours.
What's annoying to me is that I couldn't download
--Charlie
I'm happy that they are finally updating the player for Linux because the local radio stations in West Texas suck and I can listen to a few thousand others with Real. I'd like a program that is WMP compatible, too, but ya gets what ya pay for at times. :-)
:-)
Overall, the Linux version is about the same as the Windows version, with an astounding omission for the Linux side: I can no longer save presets, and my old presets were not imported at all. Hmmm, not a good sign so far. Also, of course, several of the newer 'features' of Real are not supported yet. Those features seem to be push-advertising embedded in an audio stream. Since I usually minimize RealPlayer and just listen to the radio, why should I not be able to listen to any of GlobalMedia's stations outside Windows? Even more ironic, since GlobalMedia uses Linux to serve Real streams. *sigh* I feel so marginalized.
BTW, if you look at some recent streaming-media stats, it looks like Real has about twice the number of clients downloaded as WMP, yet several of my favorite sites have converted to WMP from Real. They don't usually even include an alternate stream, just the WMP stream. HUH? If RealPlayer has twice the market penetration, why serve WMP?
Of course, the answer was given a few posts ago: Microsoft is paying them to dump Real, while Real is charging for the privilege to serve RealAudio. Not too hard to see why the change of heart. Bottom line, folks! That's all bizfolks will notice.
Illegitimi non carborundum
First of all, this doesn't work at all if you have a POP3 account--only if your local machine is getting mail via SMTP. Spammers don't connect right to YOUR machine when they spam you (unless you run a mail server).
Secondly, it doesn't work if the spammer has a dynamic IP address (since you are denying the address he used the first time but he gets a new one the second time).
Third, if you do this despite the above, make sur e you know how to read a mail header. For instance, if the spam has the From header "hotgrits@portman.com", don't block `nslookup portman.com`--that domain may not even exist. And if it does, the spam may not be from there. And don't necessarily block the SMTP server that handed the mail off to you, because it could be an innocent routing machine (although it could also be a clueless promiscuous relaying machine).
In short, don't run out and implement this idea without knowing what it does.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Shoutcast for streaming audio! And of course Quicktime..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
But the fact is, this is becoming more and more common, I think. Sites are going to WMP-only based content. Is Microsoft trying to undercut their competition again by bundling software with the OS? (And is the DoJ paying attention?) aggh...why does the DoJ have to get involved again. The government should not be involved in everything. If a consumer product pisses you off, don't buy it. If something like this happens, it's because of demand, and if enough people demand realmedia, they'll provide it. You're their customer and they do want to please you. The government can only slow down the advance of technology and/or make M$ more of a beast than it already is. Joe
DooD :// Izn't their a RPM available 2? -- /\/\00G00
Just to satisfy my own non-windows using
curiosity, what the hell is comet cursor?
The intallation of the thing was excellant, Linux needs more programs that have an installation like that. The player itself isn't bad, it looks better than the old Real Player. The quality is the same for me, as I had no complaints about the last version. The only thing that really bugs me is I can't seem to view real audio streams taht come up in a pop-up window. For example, The Golith video, or any of the vidoes' on Cnn. Just the stupid "Netscape Plugins" window pops up, telling me to download real player, which I already have installed! It's very annoying, and I'd love it if Real would add that support for the Unix's.
Or at least that they would say in the README file what libraries and versions the software needs. IT really stinks that they only say "Red Hat 6.0". And the player says "segmentation fault". Argh.
--
It has to work - rfc1925
I've spent a fair bit of time working with the UNIX versions of RealNetworks products. The Previous versions were very sad attempts at mimicing the MS versions. This looks very good.
The Install went flawlessly for me on my FreeBSD box, and has been running with out skipping a beat since. It's nice to get some of the real content.
The Video for me is very choppy. But the audio is amazing. I suppose I'll have to install RH6.1 and try it there...
While it's nice to see that Real is finally doing some work to support Linux, it's disappointing (though not surprising) to see that they only support ia32/Linux. Also, they stopped supporting the Xlib command line functions, i.e. you can't set the geometry from the command line anymore. This is extremely annoying, as it considerably increases the amount of manual work neccessary to view movies fullscreened.
What does "dino pretending" mean?
Well, I'm glad I'm it. I've achieved my main purpose of losing karma, and made a point at the same time. Hoorah *pops open champagne*
G2 was Alpha. So I was basically coming from realplayer 5, which used %s.
This version is nice... doesn't SSSSSutter, or stop playing after about an hour, or have the GUI trouble that the last one had. You have to change the ~/.mailcap file to bla/blah/realplay %u, instead of %s as before to get it to work.
I was suspicious as soon as I saw that autoinstall pkg being offered; so I used rpm2tgz (from Slack) and did the install by hand. That way everything went where I wanted it, linked to the browser of my choice ...and Netscape didn't fire up in a privilged state. (also, it was easier than looking up the myrid rpm control options)
-pea
Installed in a snap and worked fine once I remembered where the hardware volume control was on my I7.5K.
.ram fine plus real streaming media, and in the Windows trojan horse implementation includes most of the rest of the a/v universe plus half the MacOS' toolbox.. it's an edifice. And the libraries let you do serious programming. Always thought of it as the real thing but this Realplayer seems to work well on .ram files anyway.
But having developed for Quicktime 4 I've been hoping Apple will trounce with their own release, like, *today*. Quicktime plays
Hope it is just Apple polishing up the BSD libraries.. and it all fits into the Game Plan for World Domination (tm) but idiotically it seems that you would have to install VMware (which is great in itself) to view the ouput of your Apple Darwin open source streaming server from the same machine. Repeat mantra: Let them find the bugs so we don't have to..
I can't connect from home at better than 26.6K (thanks, Bell Atlantic), and WMP streamed video absolutely blows - you get a slide-show effect (if you get any pictures at all). Real, from the same site, is normally fine which suggests that Real
is better at lower bandwidths.
WMP definitely takes longer to start and connect too.
If the DOJ were to become involved in the battle of the media players similar to the web browser battle, I'd have to laugh. I'm certainly not a Microsoft supporter, but I'd find it very ironic that the only two pieces of MS software I wish i had in Linux (IE and Media Player) would be the only ones specifically under fire from the government.
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
This will only help to spur competition, hopefully until something writes an open source player that reverse engineers the WMP and Real format, and plays 'em back without all the crap.
=P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
In the list of different download platforms it says "Redhat bla bla RPM" and "Redhat bla bla non-RPM" Seems a little strange to me, aren't this package for all Linux distros? Is this because Redhat wants some credit for cooperating with Real on this one? I am now talking about the download site you get to by clicking your way from www.real.com , not the one linked in the article.
Only dead fish follow the stream
I guess the G2 player never got out of beta. I never had any problems with it, and the installation was very cool.
I just watched mtv news @200kbps. works like a charm.
Now if it just doesn't crash your browser? My browser never needed help crashing itself...As much as I liked Netscape releasing their browser for linux, it's not the most stable package in the world...
The installer can be told not to associate the files (at least it could last I installed it under win) and if you can't figure out how to get rid of the "quickstart" thingamajig, you probably don't care that it's there anyway.
The ads and difficulty downloading the free version are VERY annoying, but they've gotta make money somehow, don't they?
I stuck rpnp.so in my /usr/lib/netscape/plugins and it's working great. I'm using Redhat 6.1 and Netscape 4.61. But then again maybe I'm just lucky... RealPlayer G2 worked for me when everyone else was having problems with it too. I even took a screen-shot of the plug-in in action since I've been in such a screen-shotty mood lately.
I think if you did a fair side-by-side comparison at several different bitrates you would see that RealMedia is just as good or better than Windows ASF. You will also find that RealMedia handles bad connections, packet loss and slow connections MUCH better than ASF.
I'd really like it if you would post a site that has encoded the same media in ASF and RM at the same bitrate such that the ASF looks noticeably better than the RM. I don't think such a site exists (unless you use intentionally used the completely wrong encoding options for RM-- like "talking heads" mode for some high-action video.)
--Nick
I agree it looks like crap, though. RealPlayer just doesn't have that much GUI (just a few menus and a preferences panel) so it would be easy to have both Motif and GTK versions of it. That's not where the majority of the code is.
Can someone tell me if they're also gone in the Macintosh and Windows versions?
OTOH, it does seem to play video better than that last version, even at low data rates.
New XFMail home page
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
I installed the non-RPM version on my RedHat 6.0 box, and everything seems to work very well. The G2 beta would ping the CPU utilization on my 333mhz celeron box, but this RealPlayer7 beta is only taking up 1-2% of my CPU at most. Very nice.
Real has obviously been working on this one for a very long time (hence the mention of glibc 2.0 in the docs), and it seems like they've gotten it right. The player doesn't have nearly as many options in the preferences dialog as the Windows version, and I've noticed a GUI glitch (the percent complete bar seems to go to infinity when playing a live stream source) already, but it is so much better than the old G2 beta.
And for those who are concerned about Real's privacy protections, take a look at the latest Windows RealPlayer.. they have a many-tabbed dialog which discusses *everything* that could be in the slightest way privacy related, with full explanations and an opt-out for everything. It looks like the Linux version isn't quite as refined, but Real seems to be putting their heart in the right place on this one. I actually had a short email conversation with a person at Real who was involved with their privacy policy for Real7, and they really do seem to have gotten religion on this one.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Underneath the big headline of "RealPlayer for LINUX" people seem to have overlooked the fact that a beta for Solaris was also released.
The list of new betas is:
Solaris 2.6 (Sparc only)
Solaris 2.7 (Sparc only)
Red Hat Linux 6.0 (i386 only) RPM
Red Hat Linux 6.0 (i386 only) non-RPM
What I am sad to see is the lack of IRIX. I use SGIs at work, and RealPlayer 5.0 is just not cutting it. RealPlayer either can't support the formats or crashes.
A couple of months from now, SGI will be moving toward Linux for their desktop boxes, so I guess I will have to wait 'til then.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Actually, Microsofts main threat to their competition isn't that they bundle to player with their OS (although that's a good sized portion of it), it's that they actually PAY streaming media companies to switch to Windows media, in the form of actually purchasing boxes for them, installing them, paying for their bandwidth, and sending techs on site to troubleshoot.
It that's not unfair and leveraging from one market to another, i don't know what is. I mean, what - you can either serve in RealMedia, make people download a player, and then go and buy the server software, or you can serve Windows media, and if your site is large enough, actually GET PAID to use it.
Can't wait til some class action or something actually drains microsofts coffers a little bit so they have to once again compete on merit rather than just the fact that they have enough money to keep going and going and going long after their competition has gone bankrupt trying to compete with free and subsidized products.
Another product subisidy of theirs, coincidentally, is Windows 2000. All those success stories you read in the ads, those are all basically paid for by microsoft, who sends in tons of techs to get Win2000 running, and doesn't charge a dime for the privelegde, aside from being able to say "HEY! This company had enough confidence in our software to switch."
New strategy, i guess.
You could go with the QuickTime Streaming Server. Free server. Free clients. Sounds like a pretty good deal, so long as you're willing to cut all those pesty non-windows and non-macintosh boxes out of your viewership. But don't worry, they're only like 7 or 8% of the market, so it won't matter that much.
Oops! Did I say that?
Why hasn't Real (or WMP) even been reverse engineered? Is it really all that secure or is it just that the guru-level hackers aren't interested in "streaming media"?
If the second, look for sm to go the way of "push"...
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
are the file associations your biggest gripe?
Do you even use the file associations under linux? there is a way, but I haven't run into anyone who uses it yet, just because the amount of work it saves is (IMHO) miniscule.
Why not install it and see? I'm getting RM files to play for the first time (older versions never liked my system). It really is an easy installation.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
I'd sadly have to agree with the comments that WMP is better than Real. Using them both under windows, accessing WMP/Real alternate streams of the same content, WMP is smoother and also allows me to jump to forward positions in the stream - if I try that with Real I just get audio and the video never really restarts.
However, since Linux is my platfom of choice at home, and I use Sun at work, I'm not happy with either solution. What I'd really prefer is a truly open solution that I can use anywhere, and that the open source community can tune to be the equal of any of the closed source commercail solutions.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd suggest that the MBone tools should be used as the basis of an open source streaming video solution. I've seen a version of vic available with H.263 support which covers dial-up speeds, H.261 is available from a couple of places including openh323, which covers > 64K bps speeds such as cable/ADSL, and for even higher speeds MPEG2 is obviously the preferred choice, with the Berkley CODEC being available.
With all that beta-, unstable- or developer-versions of various programs around for Linux, one could think that there are almost no final releases.
Ok, we all know that with most of all programs even a beta-release is rock solid unless you do really obscure things with it.
Nevertheless I sure hope, there will be a final-version of the RealPlayer 7.
BTW: Why is it called "beta" and "final"? Shouldn't it be "beta" and "gamma"? =:-)
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
After Realmedia claimed to have fixed the "bugs" in the last version, I have seen a comment that RealPlayer quietly installs the dreaded Comet Cursor with it.
If you follow BUGTRAQ, you've already seen this, but for the benefit of those who don't, the following URL leads to RealNetwork's response to this exact issue: http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/archive. pike?list=1&date=2000-03-08&msg=3.0.5.32.200003091 91004.00832cc0@mail.real.com. For those not interested in following the link, the two essential bits of the RealNetwork response are:
No, I don't work for RealNetworks. Neither does my cat.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
They stated that they were thinking of porting RealPlayer for Linux to PPC. Their reason for not having a port already is that they claimed that it would take a lot more than simply re-compiling their sources for a PPC.
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
"the controls don't work quite well (try double-sizing the window during playback .. still see video? I don't) and if you really want to nit-pick, try using the menu bar while your NumLock key is on"
I just tried both things that you mentioned, and had no problems... It double-sized and kept playing nice and smoothly, and I double-sized by using the menu bar while my NumLock key was on.
Adam
Thanks to RedHat, we now have closed-source applications using the development libc for Linux systems (glibc 2.0) instead of the stable branch. Considering that the stable branch is out, and seems quite good (I run it here under Slackware 7.0), why are they releasing it for glibc2.0? That's like putting out development patches for the 2.1.x kernels now that we're onto 2.2.x (and beyond).
Sigh. At least they're not using a kernel bug this time. I just wish they'd have an LGPLed wrapper for the core so we could fix things like linking to outdated/unstable glibcs.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Hey! I want to use Mozilla with it!
Seriously, though, at least in the Red Hat RPM they distributed, they seem to have hard-coded in the assumption that you're using Netscape. In fact, when you install the RPM, it tries to start Netscape and connect to the Real site (even though one usually is root for installing the RPM). Not cool...
And there isn't apparently any place to indicate an alternate browser to be used...
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
Exactly.
I'd like to add that Real Player (in general) has to be the most unstable piece of software I've ever used and RP7 doesn't ease up. I can watch one clip under Win2K (reading off a disk) before I have to close and reopen it. Why? If I play more than two clips in a row RP7 resets my computer!
Or how about that annoying desynch if you watch realvideo for more than 2-3 minutes?
You wanna know how Microsoft's going to win the streaming media war? By creating a non-obtrusive player that sits quiet until media is presented. A player that won't spam the user with ads, make the system unstable or preload on startup.
Looks like real.com is just making it easier for them.
Jay
-- polish ccs mirror
Windows Media Player streams are simply much smoother than anything else I've seen, although I don't have much experience with Quicktime streaming to compare them.
Microsoft now has the best browser and the best streaming player. Unfortunately, I don't see Mozilla getting stable fast enough to really challenge IE, and there is certainly nothing to match Media Player on linux. :(
Can't you real networks guys get your act toghether and make a GUI in toolkit that doesn't look like shite.. Say GTK/QT. When Motif/netscape is no longer necesary because of Mozilla I hope I will never ever see one MOTIF app on my desktop again *ever*...
Now if someone updated the look on MOTIF to something more modern that would maybe make the use of MOTIF apps atleast somewhat tolerable..
What do you say lesstif guys?
I'm the maintainer of the realplayer installer
package in the contrib distribution of Debian. Just to forstall a flood of
email, I'm writing to let people know that this version will *not* be
supported by the installer until Real makes it available in some format
other than a self-extracting program that must be run as root under
X and requires user interaction to install. That's stupid, and I'm just not
gonna go there. Once a rpm or (god forbid!) a tarball is available, the
realplayer installer in unstable will be updated to use it.
In the meantime, Debian folks who really need it can install it by hand.
--
see shy jo
Sorry, but take a look at this:
http://www.fsf.org/software/libc/libc.html
Glibc 2.0 was supposed to be a stable release; most everything added afterwards is either to fix bugs or to become more standards-compliant. RedHat isn't to blame anyway:
And, it uses 2.1 anyway (welcome to the wonderful world of SHARED LIBRARIES)The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The installer (and later on, RealPlayer) seems to want to bind itself to every file extension the developers could think of at the moment of release. Then, it loads a memory-hogging piece of itself to load every time you start the OS, which newbies don't know how to get rid of (or probably don't even notice). It attempts to bombard you with ads. To download the free version on the Realmedia site, you have to go through a maze of pages asking you to pay for the player. Not to mention all the privacy issues. After Realmedia claimed to have fixed the "bugs" in the last version, I have seen a comment that RealPlayer quietly installs the dreaded Comet Cursor with it.
If the Linux version is anything like the Windows version, I don't see why everyone is so happy about this...
--
My boss decides that he wants me to add streaming to our site. Our web server runs NT (Hey! Don't look at me! I didn't install it!). Currently, I have two choices. Realmedia, whose server costs (lots?) of money, whose player I hate, who laughs at my privacy. Windows Media, whose server is free, whose player isn't so bad, who also laughs at my privacy.
If anyone can think of another choice, please let me know. I'll be very happy.
--
On all the forums and discussions on streaming media there seems to be a real (no pun intended) holy war going on between Real Server and Windows media services.
Real may be available for more platforms than WMP which is often given as a reason for providing content in that format. But Windows media services is free and that's a big problem for everyone who doesn't have Windows or Mac.
But - open source has an ace in this game - Icecast isn't the best technology - it's downright low tech - butif you're streaming audio then using icecast you can serve live content to WMP *and* Real player users as well as Xmms, winamp and all those other mp3 players.
And it's free (icecast is, shoutcast costs 300$).
So - remind all those people running windows media stations that ther is a 'better' solution out there. Better in that it offers a greater potential audience than either server.
Now... If only RP7 would download faster I wouldn't be saying things like this during the download...
You can already save your Real Audio with Streambox Ripper so I suppose you can say it has already been 'rev-enged' :)
Except Streambox Ripper doesn't know much about the Real Audio protocol. It just hitches a ride using the DLLs that the Real's player uses.
HTH,
--Matthew
My GNU/Linux box is a PowerPC (ppc), and it runs Linux as well as glibc2.1, but why do I think `Package Foo for Linux' won't run over here?
It may be quite a while until the ignorant lot get this, but we could do with a bit more enlightened view from /.
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
You can already save your Real Audio with Streambox Ripper so I suppose you can say it has already been 'rev-enged' :)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I also have the two media players installed on a WinNT box. I really don't like all the flashy extra garbage that RealPlayer has put in to their application, and honestly I think that is making their player less appealing to me. You can turn it all off, but I still don't like the fact that I've got 5MB (or whatever) of useless binary on my drive for crap I'll never use (yet, I keep getting informed to upgrade to the latest version so I can get my news ticker! ooh!).
Beta or not, I hope the media software for the UNIX world improves. That's my rant, and I'm sticking to it!
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Folks,
.RA or .RAM Real files is not in the good idea department.
.ASX files. Also, by default .ASX files sound FAR better than .RA files on V.90 analog modem connections.
.ASX file format than the Real .RA or .RAM format. Because of this, it will end up being quite a bit easier for someone to write a Linux client program that can stream .ASX files, and even possibly create .ASX files in a Linux-based streaming media server.
.ASX file format specifications fully available, because this could put a kibosh on Real Networks.
I think streaming
Having played around with RealPlayer 7.0 beta for Windows 98, that program has way too many things running in the background in addition to streaming Real files. No thanks!
Say what you want about Microsoft, but at least they got it right with Windows Media Player 6.4: it doesn't have things like channel selectors or advertisements running in the background streaming
In fact, it's actually far easier to get programming information on the
If I were Microsoft right now, I'd make the
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
it's pretty good! installation was nice (using the non RPM version), and it went just fine, except for the fact that I wasn't installing as root so it couldn't add the helper files in /usr/local/bin that it wanted to. But that's ok, I'll fix it later.
:-).
I Can watch RM files now!!! The earlier versions never worked for me at all. This one is very nice in comparison
To the guy worried about the file bindings, no, it doesn't screw anything up. I doubt it knows about the few file binding options you have under Linux. It seems to be very well behaved.
Thanks, Real! It's finally usable and I for one really appreciate it!
On another note, does anyone know what video codecs are included? Do we get the annoying Microsoft ones, too?
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
In a press conference held today by Real Inc., Vice President of Marketing Seymour Butts stated "Only 10 months after our Real Player G2 Alpha for Linux was released we unveil Real Player 7 Beta for Linux!"
"We have made great strides to bring our newest stats grab, er, player to Linux, and we hope to be well received in the Linux community."
When asked why no stable player has been released for Linux since version 5, Mr. Butts resolves "Actually the beta is the final version, we just can't say that or else we'd have to support it."
"Our next version of the Linux Real Player will be 8 Gamma, followed by 9 Delta, 10 Echo and continuing on like that. It's a pretty ingenious way to get out of supporting a product, don't you think? Our lawyers thought it up."
-- iCEBaLM
I downloaded the player this morning, and installed it---it's quite sweet. Works great with ESD, sounds very good. I'm quite pleased with it.
But there's an odd trend I've noticed... When I went to listen to the live stream of my NPR station with my spiffy new player, it couldn't play it because it was for Windows Media Player only. Doh! I wrote them to tell them that this was pretty frustrating (especially since I'm pretty sure they also used to webcast for Real player).
But the fact is, this is becoming more and more common, I think. Sites are going to WMP-only based content. Is Microsoft trying to undercut their competition again by bundling software with the OS? (And is the DoJ paying attention?)
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
There is shoutcast and icecast. (Try www.*.com for each or do a search.)
We're using icecast on one of our Linux boxes at WMU to serve up the campus radio station (http://www.widr.org). It's streaming mp3 so you can use almost any client (xmms, mpg123, real, winamp, etc) to listen.