Slashdot Mirror
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"
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.
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.