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.

Comments

Re:Realplayer

[HeUnique]

huh?? I had previously a G2 (beta) player, and now I upgraded to the version 7 beta - the mailcap is perfect (with %u)

So far, excellent later. Nice to see that the installation recognizes KDE and added the player to it (in the personal menu)

realplayer and debian

[joey]

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.
--

glibc 2.0

[ink]

Thanks to RedHat, we now have closed-source applications using the development libc for Linux systems (glibc 2.0)

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:

[ink]# ldd `which realplay`
/lib/libNoVersion.so.1 => /lib/libNoVersion.so.1 (0x40013000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x4001b000)
libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x4010e000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x40121000)
libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x4012d000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40179000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4021d000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4023a000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x4023d000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x4024e000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x40257000)
[ink]# ls -l /lib/libc.so.6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Feb 22 10:17 /lib/libc.so.6 -> libc-2.1.2.so

And, it uses 2.1 anyway (welcome to the wonderful world of SHARED LIBRARIES)

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

Why the Celebration?

[pen]

I'm not knowledgeable enough (nor do I run it often enough, yet) to install it. Can someone who uses RealPlayer under both Windows and Linux please post a comment and compare the two versions? If this thing is anything like the Windows version, I don't see why anyone is celebrating.

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...

--

Re:But is the content disappearing?

[pen]

Well, I think that my story is pretty typical.

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.

--

Streaming for Everyone

[szyzyg]

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...

Re:Its already been done.....

[Matthew Bafford]

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

For Linux (glibc2.x), but not for me?

[jcn]

Guess I asked for it, when I decided against using buying hardware (+bundled software package from IBM), but I'd greatly appreciate it if people would not assume Linux == ix86.

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

Its already been done.....

[reality-bytes]

You can already save your Real Audio with Streambox Ripper so I suppose you can say it has already been 'rev-enged' :)

RealPlayer and UNIX

[bjb]

It's a shame that when we want streaming media on the web, we have a choice of Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. The first choice is obvious to anyone reading this message, but the second choice is the shame; while the players work, they just never seem to be nearly as good as they are on any other platform. I guess to be more descriptive, I've been using RealPlayer on Solaris for about two years now, and I've never been that impressed with the output, and the Linux version is pretty much on par here. The video isn't very good, 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 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!

--

I'd rather have Linux streaming .ASX files

[RayChuang]

Folks,

I think streaming .RA or .RAM Real files is not in the good idea department.

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 .ASX files. Also, by default .ASX files sound FAR better than .RA files on V.90 analog modem connections.

In fact, it's actually far easier to get programming information on the .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.

If I were Microsoft right now, I'd make the .ASX file format specifications fully available, because this could put a kibosh on Real Networks.

Some first impressions.

[handorf]

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?

Alpha Beta Gamma Delta?

[iCEBaLM]

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

But is the content disappearing?

[Ears]

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?)

Alternative streaming servers

[MrPoopyPants]

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.