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Helix DNA Client Source On Oct 29
nexex writes "Real's Helix DNA Client's source will be released on October 29. The Helix DNA client is available through both the RCSL and the RPSL licenses. More information on these licenses at their licensing page. Intial platform support is planned for Win32, OSX, and Linux. More technical details available here."
Finally, a multi-platform media player backed by a large (think $$$) corporation with quite a big market share.
Of course, it's not entirely "free", but it's still quite a nice step forward for the OSS/FS crowd.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
(en tea)
I need a new DNA client, my DNA server is getting withered through under-use.
What does it actually do right now? Sounds like vaporware to me! To treat it as anything but pie-in-the-sky fantasy is a great disservice to all the things that actually exist right now...
Through the assistance of the Xiph.org Foundation, the Helix DNA client will supportthe Ogg Vorbis audio codec, to provide a complete open source streaming audio playe framework.
Vapourware: Products announced far in advance of any release
today is 27 oct they announce that you can download it on 29 oct. since when is two days far in advance??
In less than two days, the code will be released to the public !
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Switch a Success - Convert Thrilled
[Insert stock photo here]
I used to use those "open" media players. Now I only use ones that protect my content. That's why I use Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Media(R) Player(R) 9(R) Beta(R). Without good Digital(R) Rights(R) Management(R), there just aren't any digital rights.*
Now that we've talked about the why, here's the skinny on the how.
[Pasted instructions from help]
Now that we've gotten [fake name] to try Windows Media Player, we'll get her to try [other Microsoft product].
*for the recoding industry.
MPlayer is not multiplatform; it's only for Unix systems. Besides, it doesn't play Sorenson v.3 and some other closed formats. Nevertheless it's still my favourite movie player :-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
their website is frelled.
based on previous comments i'm guessing its some sort of media player.
why should i care about it versus all the other ones out there?
and how do posts like this get through without describing what it is they're selling? i mean, we all know that the minute we post a URL its gonna get slashdotted, so a concise summary of the article would be nice.
I would argue that that the RPSL is actually even more Free than the GPL in the sense that it attempts to close the ASP Loophole as explained in this Newsforge article.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't Winamp doing this already? I know the program doesn't run on UNIX or Linux based systems, and unto itself isn't Open-Source, but it is expandible.
I think if you're going to have a DNA client, you should call it "Sperm 1.0".
I wonder why I can find a screenshot of "MPlayer on Windows XP" then (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/screen.html 9th row, middle column)
According to the specs:c h/client .html
https://www.helixcommunity.org/content/te
the RealVideo and RealAudio parts won't be opensourced. This really sucks, I'll stay with MPlayer.
This DNA comes from a heavily inbred population and may contain high concentrations of recessive traits. You might to take note of this fact if you intend to splice and combine this DNA with some of our own.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Maybe it's like that Sounds of Math article You can listen to the sound that makes you, just don't take the ending that seriously
(Slaps head) Scratch that I forgot that they are the foremost makers of mindnumming and gut turning Adware^M^M^MSoftware. There you got mental AND gastric disorders.....
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The only thing they have open source in this is MP3, and we've had that for quite a while with xmms. All the Realplayer stuff is closed source binary only. Sure, it's still a welcome release, just not too exciting.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Pt...the banner ad on Slashdot told me that days before this story broke on Slashdot. ;-)
has been very good for linux. :)
WE DO NOT have any other streaming media player. Goto CBSnews and try to play a video without real.
It is even better that it is open source. The last client (Realone ) for linux was permanently beta and it seems work is progressing at a snails pace. This just injects some new life into real .
Real 9 is a very nice format MUCH better than the crap the previous format was. Lets see how helix worksout.
I wonder if KDE or GNOME will have a client out first
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Um, whoa. How is making money off software when you like or also have free softwre hypocritical. Its a preference not a religion (although some people are just that zeolistic(that a word?) about it) Thats realism, have to do it somehow, a lot of free software is user supported, ex that program that went open source based on raising X funds, (the name of which escapes me. And greedy? everyones got to eat dude
Jesus saves, everyone else takes full damage from the fireball.
I was listening to a song on the PC and it was like 'beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep'
And then, like, half of my audio collection was gone
And I was like, 'Hmmm?!'
It devoured my mp3s
I had some really good albums
And then I had to download them all again and I had to do it fast so I couldn't get 'em all
It's kind of... a... bummer
My name is Eric Krout, and I'm definitely going to compile the Helix DNA client source on October 29th!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At first I thought this was some sort of "client" for munging DNA data. Then I went to their site, saw the "Helix" name and the double-stranded DNA logo, and thought for sure this was some sort of DNA data client of some kind, maybe for keeping track of genes and identifying mutations and disease-causing traits or something. That'd be cool, if only I could get data into it. Then I read a bit further and see that it's a media player of some kind?
Am I the only one that thinks they've taken the whole "DNA" bit a little too far? That's like me going out, plastering up billboards with pictures of a computer, circuit boards, naming my company "SensorTronic" and my product "128-bit Heuristic Data Sampler 1.0", which is actually ketchup.
... for the rest of their plans to be completed.
a lText
From the site:
Standards-Based A/V Data Type Support
The Helix DNA client will contain support in source code form for the following data types:
MP3
Narrowband AMR
H.263
In addition, binary-only support will be provided for:
RealAudio G2
RealAudio 8
RealVideo G2
RealVideo 7
RealVideo 8
RealVideo 9
In the future, RealNetworks may be able to release support for:
SMIL
JPEG
GIF
PNG
PCM
AVI
WAV
AU
Re
RealPix
Right now, I'll stick with my media "toolbox" and see what the "Swiss Army Knife" looks like when it's done.
They would better work on support of Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Speex codecs. Those are open source and mp3 is obsolete.
:wq
When I go to https://www.helixcommunity.org/content/client.html , I get a warning from my browser that the site's security certificate was issued by a company that it's nto configured to trust. Anyone heard of "Como Class Security Services CA" before?
This is a trick. Don't fall for it. Seriously, all "content" producers are starting to introduce new "tools" that promise great new stuff, but are really Trojan horses for DRM. I say no.
.nosig
Artificial Insemination 8.0.0.0.0.0, so easy to do, you'll never have sex again!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
over the years. The worst and I mean the worst part about it is you always have to triplicate or quadricate your work because if you leave any kind of browser or platform out whines will be a calling from the peanut gallery.
Years ago we used real, but then real started bloating the crap outta their player with nagging popups and BSOD, so people started wanting windows media more, since it was installed in the OS and didn't require a seperate download. Problem is, most people in the publishing industry use macs, so we had to do quicktime too. Right now anytime the boss says "Do some digital video" I go "Ugggh!" because I have to do work to deliver to 4 different platform.
Which is why this statement caught my eye..
The Helix platform will provide a single solution for all your digital media delivery. Currently, three disparate digital media architectures power 90% of media consumption. To maximize audience potential, enterprises and service providers are often forced to support all three platforms, including separate operating as well as development costs for each platform. This wastes time, money, and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. The Helix platform services all three of those architectures, today!
So no more jumpin hoops between 6 different applications to make content? Thats fucking bitchin as hell!!! I've been using linux lately for both firewire and BT878 capture, and although the editing tools don't compare to premiere or virtual dub, the reliability of the capture is so much better than it was in windows, I can't look back. Helix looks to be an alternative to getting a lot of work done all at once, instead of application hopping. (Which sucks)I see Helix doing well, i'm going to fuck around with it today if I can. Anything that gives me more time for pr0n and counterstrike is priceless.
...they reverse engineer the format of Windows Media itself, and make an open-source codec for it.
I wanna play WMA streams on my Unix box, without having to use M$ binary only windoze codecs.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I was about to post a comment saying "Okay, this is interesting, there's some project that is going to try to make a cross-platform media player, that's a nice goal, and great for linux users, but Quicktime already does anything i want it to. What can this do Quicktime can't?"
Anyway, i'm really curious how much they'll commit themselves to this. I can at least tell they are still going to keep their crown jewels-- the RealAudio/Realvideo codecs-- to themselves-- from the faq:Meh. Still, though, even if the codecs are going to be black boxes in this Helix system, how close to them can you get? In the past, as far as i can tell, Real has always licensed its realmedia-embedding APIs such that anyone who gets to use them has to agree they will never use those APIs to create a program that will convert from Real into some other format. But if they're open-sourcing a media system that plugs into the realmedia codecs, then that would imply that it would be relatively easy to create something like a RealVideo streamripper, or a RealAudio-to-mp3 converter. Are they going to try to prevent this? How? Does the license give them the ability to do this? (I'm really sorry, but i haven't even attempted to read those licenses yet. As you can tell from my frightful spelling, i just woke up, and there's no way i will be able to parse legalese right now.) The FAQ says their license is "like" the GPL, but says it has different patent language (unsurprisingly) and says something confusing about "folding back" code that sounds vaguely NPLish.. I will be VERY interested to see what RMS' comments on it are.
Anyway, this should go somewhere interesting. It would be nice if MPEG4 over RTSP could become the worldwide streaming media standard, but RealVideo with an open-source media platform wrapped around it wouldn't be *too* bad. At the least y'all linux people might finally get a *REAL* generic media layer API
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's an ad. They warned us of these ads a while ago. Please stop crying and get back to consuming.
Not quite as good as your thinking. The Helix Producer is only capable of producing only Real codec content. Helix Server can however serve/work with encoders for real, windows media, and quicktime. This will help consolidate your servers (good thing) but you will still need multiple encoding platforms. bart
I'm the Helix Community Coordinator (though I'm getting many complaints for my self-chosen wimpy title...suggestions appreciated).
Basically, what's interesting about this is that it's a generalized architecture for any datatype. So, while it's true that there are many MP3 players out there, there's few which are able to handle multiple streams, mixing them with other audio sources, adding in multiple video sources, and hey, throw in some JPEGs, GIFs and Flash while you're at it.
What we're releasing on October 29th won't look very sexy from an end-user perspective. We're basically putting out an engine that'll do all of that stuff with the right plugins. However, it's a down payment on much more. We hope to soon ship support for SMIL, JPEG, GIF, etc.
In the meantime, the technology we're releasing is nothing to sneeze at. I think a lot of the stereotypes about the RealOne Player will be dispelled with the code that we ship. Please take a look, we think you'll like what you see!
Rob
(who's now realizing that he's declared open season on himself for soliciting title suggestions)
MPlayer plays WMA on Unix. You need the Windoze DLLs though, but the MPlayer page can probably point you to the sources if you don't have the pleasure of Windows already.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
yeah, I know. avifile works well, too.
But I want an open source codec.
And besides, surely the windows binary codecs will only work on x86 machines?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
It was a crude hack to prove they can do it.. not a part of the actual distribution. Of course, if you can tell me how to get MPlayer running on Windows, please let everyone know.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
Thank you for your information; I looked around a bit on the mplayer website and couldn't find it there.
Thanks again!
It's mentioned in their FAQ (and I'm in the process of trying it) that it can be compiled for win32 using cygwin.
this doesn't mean I'll succeed though, the slightest of tweaking required and I'll fail. don't know anything about linux.
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
It looks like another of those "code our product for nothing, and then we'll make money out of it" licenses. I don't like that... not one bit.
I wish they would get it, you show all the cards and play it right, or you don't play.
I thought it was some elaborate attempt by the poster to kill the server (which is probably what a slashdotting on https would do), but who knows...
Helix, groovy as it is, won't solve these problems for you anytime soon.
.rm playback into the OS.
People will still want Windows Media since it is installed, and Mac people will still want QuickTime. Apple might incorporate Helix playback in QuickTime (unlikely, but possible), but it is very unlikely Microsoft would build
The only format that works for good fire-and-forget universal playback today is MPEG-1. But that means no real-time streaming, and huge files. There is hope for MPEG-4, which is already supported by both Real and (in a more limited subset) QuickTime, but there isn't any default Windows Media support no or promised.
MPEG-4 is also fragmenting somewhat, between Simple (a baseline) and Advanced Simple (much better, but not supported in QuickTime) today, and MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264 (much better yet, and in products 2003).
Unfortunately, just having a ".mp4" file doesn't tell you what player specs are requried to play it back.
My video compression blog
We're not shipping the actual SMIL file format just yet purely due to time constrants in getting the code released. Taking proprietary code public is not an easy task, and our engineers have been working around the clock to release what we are releasing. We'll hopefully follow up with the actual SMIL code in a later release.
Rob Lanphier
Helix Community Coordinator
I was trying to add RTSP/RTP support to wget, but it turns out that Real uses a "secret handshake" to validate clients before xmiting data.
I am simply not smart enough (or at least not knowledgeable enough about debuggers and asm) to reverse engineer the protocol. I tried to check the Helix source a few weeks ago . . . but obviously it wasn't there.
Does anyone know if they are opening the handshake code up?
-Peter
This seems similar to Microsoft's attempt at "shared source"--a reaction to a very real threat from open source projects, although the Helix license is a little more liberal. Ogg Vorbis and similar projects must really be scaring RealNetworks.
Overall, I suppose it's good: a documented media format is better than an undocumented one even if the documented media format comes with strings attached. But I'll still stick with completely open formats.
I am so sick of all the misnomers used in marketspeak nowadays! A software media player product is not DNA or a helix, or whatever! I couldn't tell what the product actually was until I saw the company name. Motorola is guilty of this too (their Digital DNA, whatever that is). Come on, folks, isn't our field interesting enough without having to borrow (steal) terms from other fields? I doubt the DNA researchers (the real ones, not pretenders) want to name their latest discovery "the Software Media Player" gene.
The Helix DNA Client web page (https://www.helixcommunity.org/content/tech/clien t.html) says that the client will include "TurboPlay":
The Helix DNA client will include TurboPlay(TM) technology. Through TurboPlay, broadband PC users get near-instant playback of streaming audio and video. TurboPlay dramatically reduces the time it takes to load or "buffer" a clip prior to playback by intelligently utilizing available bandwidth on a broadband connection, typically achieving more than five times the speed of previous streaming systems.
Does anyone have any idea what bandwidth maximizing strategy they are actually using? What are they doing here that is actually original?
cpeterso
Why would you use this crap made by some arrogant geeks from Hungary if you can run native applications on Windows?
Eris S. Raymond is gay and ugly as hell.
Helix servers can stream any codec (quicktime, mpeg4, windows media, and real among many others). However, Helix producs can not encode TO other formats. It only encodes to RM (from what I know.) However, the beauty of them opening this stuff up is someone can make a producer that can encode to the major formats eventually.
RealOne player can also playback the 3 most popular video codecs: quicktime, windows media, and RM (and divx.) The only thing missing from RealOne Player is Ogg in my opinion.
Having one server to server everything kicks ass though. Especially since you can run it on windows, linux/unix, solaris, etc etc etc.
Go to hell, Eric Krought.
Plsdie, E R I C thx.
So rather than switch to an open-source player that uses proprietary codecs, you'll use a buggy, nearly-impossible-to-configure-and-install open-source player that uses proprietary codecs. Sounds like a great plan to me...
No tea.
I have the latest RealPlayer and RealOne sources for Linux. I can send them to you. Just ask.
...this release date was chosen just to steal some of Rockstar's thunder dealing with the release of Grand Theft Auto Three: Vice City on the 29th.
Because the Hungarian alphaware cygwin hack can actually re-encode the movie to a different (open) format. And it can read some files for which there is no standalone player, like those embedded movies from Quake. And loads of other fun stuff that WinMediaPlayer won't let you do.
formally this attempt at humor (though successful) is wrong. sperm serves DNA to the egg. if we would follow the reasoning of the author of the parent comment, sperm could be considered a server when single, and a client when fused to the egg. (errmmmm.....)
;-)
let's ignore the complication that the sperm cell merges with the egg cell. a more accurate description of sperm is that it's comparable to an ethernet package in an overcrowded, badly configured, collision plagued ethernet network, where millions of packages try to reach a host and only one finally reaches its destination.
brrr, how horribly inefficient nature is compared to computers
lemme guess: (Score:-5, Ridiculous)
That's the protocol, but have a look at our latest version of SeX (R), with full client/server architecture.
From the FAQ:
Q: What is it?
A: Simply put, SeX(R) is an implementation of the Bee, Pollen & Flower concept.
Q: Why would I need a client/server architecture?
A: In fact you don't , but we highly recommend it for stability purposes. There are standalone versions, but only SeX will give full satisfaction and process functionality.
Q: Is it secure?
A: That depends. Microsoft (TM) alternatives are very prone to virus infections. In a promiscuous, multi-user client/server structure proper safeguards (e.g. firewalls) are recommended although the functionality of Sperm 1.0 might be adversely affected.
Q: Is it free?
A: That depends: Although we advocate the Open Sauce approach, we can not garantee you free (as in beer) access to SeX. However, modifications can be distributed freely.
I feel so sig.
No luck. it's definitely not for the faint of heart.
too bad, it showed a lot of promise.
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
... right on schedule.
where is QuickTime on Linux? (native)
When you get it in, get the wget team to put out a release. There are a lot of us out here that would very much like to get our hands on this. :-)
May we never see th
quicktime is only available on Mac and windows as far as I know. so if Joe is using linux, he's SOL. From what Rob has said this seems to be an emerging technology. So if Joe needs SMIL support, this is a place he can get it, potentially.
If Real gets this licensed under an OSI license that is GPL compatible, I think it will be a very good thing for all of us. If Real truly is going to take an approach with helping the software community as the goal, then I hope they thrive and create an opportunity to produce software that makes them money as well. (I'm assuming their intention is to make money off the server software.)
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
BBW Branch Both Ways
BEW Branch Either Way
BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
BH Branch and Hang
BMR Branch Multiple Registers
BOB Branch On Bug
BPO Branch on Power Off
BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
CDS Condense and Destroy System
CLBR Clobber Register
CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately
CM Circulate Memory
CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
CRN Convert to Roman Numerals
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