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Real Announce Helix Grant Program, Player

Posted by simoniker on from the not-to-be-confused-with-other-helix dept.

Rob Lanphier writes "RealNetworks made two announcements at LinuxWorld this week: we will be giving out up to $75,000 by the end of the year for development of open source projects based on the Helix multimedia platform. Also, we just formally launched the Helix Player project, which is a project to build a GTK+ based user interface for Linux, Solaris, and other UNIXy operating systems. Press releases for the grant program here and player project here"

7 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pffff... If only by minus_273 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    hey i got the beta version no faxing here.. just registered online but more than that i ask,, what does this thing do that xine 's gtk interface laready doesnt do? or Maplyer.. which is very cross platform and fast...

    --
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    The war on terror is a war for peace
  2. TRPlayer?!? by thor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    TRPlayer

    thor

  3. Development by chunkwhite86 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While any commercial software that gets developed for Linux is a plus for everyone involved, I think their $75k would be better spend on a programmer for a year. This seems like an inexpensive way for them to generate "buzz" around their product in the OSS community - even though their product is not OSS.

    Don't get me wrong - I think the REAL codecs are great, but this "offer" isn't.

    --
    I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
  4. If you don't want scalability by benwaggoner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While I love MPEG-4 for what it's good at, what it's good at doesn't include real-time streaming over the public internet. Darwin + MPEG-4 doesn't offer any good form of scalability. Thus, if you encode a file at 400 Kbps, and a user's connection is 350 Kbps for a few minutes, they'll get a horrible quality experience.

    RealMedia supports SureStream, which lets you put up to eight pairs of video and audio into a single file, and the server and player communicate in real time to determine the optimum data rate for the transmission. It'll even raise and lower data rate as connection speed changes - very useful for cable modem and shared bandwidth from work.

    This will come in MPEG-4 eventually, via Fine Grain Scalability (FGS), or some future scalable version of the AVC codec. But that's a couple years away from being in real consumer products I'd guess.

    Oh, and I totally don't believe that you really regularly use MPEG4IP for volume compression. I mean, the TOOLS are there, but you have to go through like five different command line steps to make a file. It can produce fine results (it uses Xvid), but MPEG4IP is really like LAME - it's not meant as an end-use tool in and of itself. Well, the player is fine stand alone.

    --

    My video compression blog
  5. Real is interoperable by joaorf · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Real Video 9 is probably the best video codec nowadays (along with VP6).
    And if you want interoperability, Real is still the way to go. There is no other format for streaming media where all the following applies:
    1. Streaming server running on Linux
    2. Encoder running on Linux
    3. Players for Linux (including Alpha, PowerPC and IA32 architectures) and a few other Unix-type systems: Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Mac OS X.
    4. Server and players capable of understanding SMIL
    Plus, most of the server, encoder and player code is open-source (except the GUI). I have already compiled it, and it works great.

    And people who really understand about streaming media know that MPEG4 is no alternative, yet.

    1. Re:Real is interoperable by evilviper · · Score: 3, Interesting
      And people who really understand about streaming media know that MPEG4 is no alternative, yet.

      And what is the problem with MPEG4? Licensing is a serious problem, but I don't think you were talking about that.

      The only other problem with MPEG-4 is that most people use an AVI container, but that's certainly not required. You could be streaming MPEG-4 in an Ogg container if you like (although icecast for Ogg isn't considered stable, it has been operating in the wild for some time), or you could stick it in a .MOV container which is recomended, and stream it with any of the normal tools.

      An open standard is an open standard, and unless they are seriously lacking compared to the propritary alternatives, they nearly always win in the long run.
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  6. Re:Why? by joaorf · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Like I wrote before, it's not a question of how many formats it supports. Helix is also capable of playing, encoding and serving proprietary formats like WM and Quicktime if just someone writes a plugin for it. And the plugin architecture of Helix is very clean: just drop the plugin file in a directory and use it.

    Helix has got a much more advanced streaming technology. It can get/send streams by TCP, UDP and HTTP. It supports multi-bitrate streams (a single stream can be encoded in more than one bit rate). The player has better buffering. And it supports something than neither Xine or MPlayer have ever dreamed of: markup and scripting with SMIL, RealText and RealPix.