Slashdot Mirror
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."
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??
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.
Not entrirely free? Well it's not open either.
The open formats it supports are already out there, they've kept the useful ones, Real Streaming support as binary only.
It's also crippled, in that it doesn't support SMIL, so the fancy type of streaming done right now with real (pictures, and text with your video) aren't possible.
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.
And then we'll have what - a half proprietary (binary only)/half open media player? What's the point? There are already excellent tools to deal with the well-documented open multimedia formats, and these are truly open projects. If you believe for a second that this Helix hype is going to be one tenth as useful as those readily-available tools then you're a sucker.
I think if you're going to have a DNA client, you should call it "Sperm 1.0".
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
Nullsoft does have a Linux release of WinAmp out. Of course, I don't know why you'd use it when you have xmms...
May we never see th
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
How about the Office source instead?
May we never see th