Real Announce Helix Grant Program, Player

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"

Comments

If you don't want scalability

[benwaggoner]

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.

Real is interoperable

[joaorf]

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.

Re:Why?

[joaorf]

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.