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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.
We better stop them fast before they steal any more of our freedom.
--sdem
Real already knows my genenetic code they have so much junk watching me when I install Real software with default options. They've probably figured out a way to have my monitor probe my brain.
Paranoia? I don't think so...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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"
Didn't you get the memo?
That was the entire point of their Helix Project.......
So if you could just put the new cover sheet on, that'd be great........And I'll see you get another copy of the memo.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
Is there any Free streaming media server that is robust and supports open codecs? I'd even be willing to make some compromises. Of the proprietary codecs, Real is the best. Is there any free way to stream it? Darwin Streaming Media is no good because it only supports proprietary codecs and the inferior ones (in installed base at least) at that.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I meant to link to this Infoworld story. Oh well, one day I'll learn how cut 'n paste works under X. ;)
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.
What is Helix DNA? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
On one hand, it's from Real -- the first major media company to release a player that (depending on a few bits in a file) won't let you save an internet multimedia stream, the precursor to modern DRM. Real also brought us RealONE, the most junk-infested media player ever, famous for spraying garbage all over your system without your consent.
Now they're releasing a player and its source with ogg support built in? If there's one thing we need in the media arena, it's an open file format and codecs to combat proprietary windows media, real, and quicktime. This sounds like it could be really cool.
But is it for Real?
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?).
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
I don't know why I chose that subject line, but whatever. :)
I appreciate that you recognize we're rolling up our sleeve pretty far to show there's nothing up it. The "spyware" complaints have persisted for years after someone found one rogue chunk of code that sent us a lot of useless information that was going in the bit bucket (if you look at what was being collected, it really wasn't interesting).
Nevertheless, you're absolutely right: if you don't trust us, build your own player.
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!
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Helix is mostly open source. That's a good thing.
Some of it is not. That's unfortunate.
Real has been an annoying company, what with spyware and such. That's unfortunate.
Real is realeasing code you can either play with, or ignore. That's a good thing.
If Real gets a benefit from giving away code in terms of PR, browney points or Slashdot Karma, what's the problem, again? That would be the case because some people, somewhere, appreciated what Real did.
Of course there's a strategy behind doing so, and I suspect it isn't quick what RMS would prefer. If that weren't the case, we'd be chatting about this on Fucked Company instead of here.(Which is not to assert GPLed software can't support a company - if that were the case, I'd have a little problem.)
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
"Servers" don't run as CGI scripts, dynamic web applications do.
In any case, do you have data to back up your claim that "most" do not use CGI? I would actually bet that CGI is still by far the most widely used server side scripting approach when you look at number of distinct installations. Of course, high-volume sites like AOL or Yahoo!, etc., have some incentive to use non-CGI interfaces, but they are the exception.
CGI scripts aren't even a scalable way to do web programming under Unix,
My Linux machine easily manages 200 CGI script invocations per second without even breaking into a sweat; what fraction of installed web servers do you think needs to handle 200 hits per second to dynamically generated web pages? Tiny, I would guess. Furthermore, the overhead of starting a CGI script is actually negligible compared to the operations that most CGI scripts actually do.
much less media streaming
The primary overhead of command line programs vs. plug-ins is that the command line programs involve forks to start up. That's a complete non-issue for streaming. Therefore, if anything, multimedia processing is better, not worse, for a UNIX approach.
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.
They have been: most of the UNIX/Linux players use skinning, which means they don't behave properly as desktop applications, they are flaky, they are hard to install, and the video code they contain is almost completely non-reusable for other purposes. In short, they are designed and work just like their Windows counterparts.
What we really need is the equivalent of NetPBM for video. Transcode tries, but it's still ways off from being as clean and simple.
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.
My video compression blog
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.
My video compression blog