RealNetworks Releases Helix DNA Producer Source

Rob Lanphier writes "We just released the Helix DNA Producer, a multi-format media-encoding engine for creating streaming broadcasts, on-demand streaming content, and downloadable audio video files. It supports RealAudio, RealVideo and Ogg Vorbis, and includes many input and output filters, variable bitrate encoding support, option for two-pass encoding, audio gain control, Firewire support. Press release is here and a couple of stories are here(1) and here(2)." Here's a page that details the licenses under which the code can be obtained.

Comments

Re:GPL violations?

[Enry]

OGG isn't GPL'd. It has a BSD license.

Re:How about the server?

[robla]

Our server will be released early next year. It's in the FAQ.

Re:How about the server?

[damiam]

Icecast and Quicktime Streaming Server are both Free. Icecast does Ogg, and QT does MPEG4.

Where I meant to link

[robla]

I meant to link to this Infoworld story. Oh well, one day I'll learn how cut 'n paste works under X. ;)

Ogg Vorbis reference software licensing

[yerricde]

OGG isn't GPL'd. It has a BSD license.

You're both right. Parts of Xiph.org's Ogg Vorbis reference software are under a BSD style license; parts are under the GPL. The libvorbis* packages and the Tremor decoder are BSD licensed, but libao and the vorbis-tools (executables such as oggenc, ogg123, etc) are under the GNU General Public License (or is it Lesser GPL now?).

Re:How about the server?

[robla]

One thing I should clarify now....we are planning to release our server software under the terms of the RCSL only (our community source license) rather than RPSL (our open source license). The client and producer have both been released under RPSL/RCSL dual license.

This may impact your definition of a "free" server. However, the source code will be available to the community in the same way that our client and producer software are.

Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

[tabdelgawad]

I really don't understand why a large number of the comments here are negative. Simply stated, Real has released a significant piece of software under what appears to be a free/open source license (The RPSL has been submitted to the OSI for certification). The open source community is certainly no worse off and probably significantly better off because of this.

So the Real codecs aren't open sourced. Well, neither is DivX nor Quicktime, but that doesn't stop DivXNetworks or Apple from being darlings of the geek community. It's true that Real clients have been extremely intrusive, but their current actions should be judged independently.

In fact, the open source community has a vested interest in the success of Real's Helix since that would demonstrate that open sourcing can be a successful *business* strategy. Open source commercial successes are few and far between, so it doesn't make sense to beat up on Real just as they are starting to do something right!

Re:Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

[robla]

Ugh...comparing us to a rapist child predator, and you get modded up to a 2?

Regardless of where you wanted to go with this analogy, what you are doing is driving a wedge between RealNetworks and the open source community. You. It's your post that many RealNetworks employees are going to read, and they are going to say "why are we even bothering?" The longtime open source fans here get demoralized, and the others just flip the idiot bit on the "Slashdot crowd".

The software you are complain about has always been free of charge, and for the past few years, supported in part by an advertising business. As I've addressed in another post, our reputation on the "spyware" front is based on one errant feature which collected useless data and which we eliminated long ago. It may have been obnoxious, but it's not even remotely worthy of a child rape comparison.

Personally, I'm doing everything I can to ensure we improve our reputation, both by getting the word out that we're working to improve our relationship with our customers (huge priority for all of us), and making sure we live up to a better reputation.

If you'd truly like to influence us on these types of issues, do two things:

• Go through official channels. You've got people who are gathering statistics and studying the data and working to improve our relations with the community, rather than preaching to what is obviously the choir here.
• Help make the Helix Community a success. If the community is successful, you'll have an alternate engine that can have whatever you want in it (and not have what you don't want).

Darwin Streaming Server supports many open formats

[benwaggoner]

Sorry, try again.

Darwin Streaming Server can serve many file types, and many non-propritary formats. These include

MPEG-1
MPEG-4
MP3
QuickTime movies with non-propritary codecs like H.261 and H.263

QuickTIme has a packet structure for streaming, fully documented, and anyone and their dog can build a codec that can hint to a QuickTime streaming package. Heck, Darwin Streaming Server can even stream formats QuickTime can't play back, like MPEG-4 Advanced Simple.

Reasonable an Non-Discriminatory

[benwaggoner]

Patent fees don't mean propritary. MPEG-4, as an ISO standard, is licensed under RAND - Reasonable and Non-Discriminiatory terms. This means no-one gets a sweetheart deal on using it. And it is fully published, with reference software to boot.

So, while it isn't free as in beer, it is for the most part free as in speech.

I'm hoping one of the first Helix Producer projects is to hook the Producer preprocessing engine into the MPEG4IP encoding tools (Xvid, plus AAC-LC, plus a muxer) into a good, open source MPEG-4 authoring tool.