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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.
One of my main problems with realplayer (and other real products) is the fact that it dumps all manner of ad- and spy-ware on my computer whenever i install it. Therefore, i wonder if the lisence includes stipulations about including advertising software despite the rest of the project being open source. Other than a scheme such as this one, I can't see how a company with a financial scheme like Real could get much benefit out of this arrangement. After all, I find it hard to imagine a large company such as this one just trying to do the Right Thing by the open source people.
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
...I grew tired of the constant barrage of Real Player updates long ago. It seems they only provide and use thier products as customer info gathering/profiling tools.
I avoid the use of any 'Real' audio components, both client and server related. There are always other choices.
Unless they've recently changed things they are open sourcing everything aside from the realplayer 7/8/9 codecs themselves (which means they open source the player, the encoding software, the helix framework). These codecs will be available as binaries, and released under a licence that permits free use. The licence cannot be revoked, unlike mp3.
They have a moral obligation to release their code under the BSD license . . . What a bunch of anti-innovation socialists.
Nice troll. They wrote the code, they can do what they want with it.
deus does not exist but if he does
BSD would not protect them from Microsoft.
See my AC comment (#4850475) for how much Real is actually giving away though.
Yes, but does anyone use real format anymore? I thought most indie music streamers used MP3.
Glad to see this software supports Ogg Vorbis though. I have half my music in Mp3 and the other half in Ogg.
They didn't mention BSD or GPL license though... hopefully it isn't some BS source license like the microsoft "shared source", that is useless to the OSS community..
So long as it doesn't have any spyware or adware in it, the source license is reasonable, and the quality is OK, this is probably a Good Thing(tm).
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
There are a *lot* of "interesting" parts to a streaming media system, of which the codecs comprise a small portion. On the client side, there's file format readers, the protocol engine, the audio device management, video alphablending, and an object model to tie it all together. On the producer side, there's input and output filters, variable bitrate encoding support, option for two-pass encoding, audio gain control, Firewire support.
As for the license, what's wrong with it?
They've been pretty heavy handed both trying to get people to use the pay version of realplayer, and trying to get it as prevalent on installed systems as possible. While personally I'm not thrilled at either, it's pretty easy to have some sympathy for their reasoning. I don't know if anyone here has tried to get people to give mozilla a shot, but one of the first complaints I always got was that it started up slower than IE. The quickstart was always one of the first things they wound up doing once they decided to switch. It often takes a lot of explaining before people grasped exactly why IE started so quickly. It's just not easy to compete with components built into the operating system. Don't use a quickstart and a significant amount of the potential audience will complain because it's slower to start than programs integrated into the operating system. Do use a quickstart, and another large user base will complain. The latter at least though for the most part would be able to figure out how to turn that behavior off, so I can sympathise with their decision. Seriously now, they're trying to compete with microsoft. That's not exactly an easy endevor!
What I find very odd is all the complaints about statistic reporting.
Real: We've listened to your complaints and removed the spyware for you, given you a lean player that additionally supports ogg and which allows you to create your own gui.
User: I'm not listening to you because you have spyware in your product, you don't support ogg and I hate your gui!
Everything will be taken away from you.
Oh, great. So now we get the RPSL, the RCSL (the latter available in three tasty flavors!), and more.... Couldn't we please just stick to GPL, LGPL, or BSD? Those three licenses cover most of the free software territory, and while I admit that reading them gives me just as much a headache as reading many other licenses, at least I only have to go through it once....
--Bruce Fields
WTF does your senator have to do with open codecs? That's like writing to your senator asking him/her to make everyone use Linux. Besides, the people who make the codecs are entitled to their work, and shouldn't have to release it if they don't want to. Patents are another issue, and possibly the most important one, but your post didn't mention that.
If you will recall, Microsoft lobbed the first volley in the "MIME war." Their media player took over some RealNetworks mime types. RealNetworks' response was to spearhead an initiative to encourage software makers to be more forthcoming to end users about which mime types they claim. In fact, these days just about every media player allows the user to configure this via the installer. This seems to be a benefit of their fight against Microsoft.
Furthermore, I think you're mistaken on your bullet points. But then, I would have a hard time convincing someone that has already made up his mind and has no facts to defend his standpoint.
In the meantime, please feel free to enjoy Microsoft's illegal monopoly and encourage them to trample any and all of their competitors. Real is by no means perfect, but regardless of how you perceive their past conduct they are obviously trying to be better community members. And at least they aren't Microsoft.
--Nick
Just about every interesting CGI script on the web these days talks to "huge, monolothic" database server - think PHP. So much for the "UNIX small command-line tool" approach.
Small command-line tools are appropriate for hacking together text processing filters, but I can't see them being useful for building a multimedia pipeline. If you care about synchronization, then you need in-process and/or shared memory communication, not a unix pipe.
Nice handwaving. Most Unix servers do not run as "CGI Scripts". CGI scripts aren't even a scalable way to do web programming under Unix, much less media streaming.
Also, I'm sure the folks at MPlayer and other Unix-native desktop video software were unaware that they had been corrupted by Windows methodologies.
The problem with your analogy is that the situation between a rapist and a child is almost certainly a zero-sum game. The child's gain (in terms of safety) is the rapists loss, and vice versa. In that scenario, any self-interest motivated action by the rapist is automatically suspect as it will hurt the child.
Zero-sum games are not useful for describing the relationship between commercial software developers and users. The primary goal of commercial developers is to make money, not to screw consumers (sometimes they *do* screw consumers in their attempt to make money, but that is mostly incidental and tends to be punished by the market, as the near-demise of Real itself demonstrates). The actions of Real here are most certainly motivated by commercial self-interest, but that in no way implies that they will harm users (or the OS community). As a matter of fact, it is plain that Real's actions here are beneficial to users and the OS community (how beneficial remains to be seen) as I tried to point out in the parent post.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Unadulterated bollocks. I can edit, convert, re-encode and generally mess about with my MPEG4 clips all I want. I have to pull teeth to extract content from proprietary Real files, which use patented technology to boot.
There are open-source implementations of MPEG4 such as Xvid. With an open-source codec which can create standards-compliant streams, you have the portability required or at least the potential to be covered against the death of the company holding the keys to your media, and more importantly you have immediate control of said media - the ability to convert it to other formats, for instance.
- Chris