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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"
options.c
bool DRM_Enabled = True;
bool player_works = True
etc.. etc..
sounds like this could be a good thing. the older versions of real player for linux worked with moderate success. but they were shoved far out of reach on the real site like that guy in office space who likes his stapler so much. the versions weren't quite current and the players were sub-standard compared to the windows version. it'd be nice if they released a decent media player for linux and even better if it were open sourced.
Can I port the bit of Realplayer that takes over your browser and can only be removed with holy water and a complete reinstall?
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Its half of their yearly revenue these days...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Programmers could be the bounty hunters of the future, coding and chasing down bugs for profit and adventure.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Linux, Solaris, and other UNIXy operating systems.
Why not just sum that up with "Derivatives of SCO IP" ?!?
People these days...
The unofficial
Real >>>buffering 34%>>> Player is some >>>buffering 46%>>> of the >>>buffering 54%>>> finest >>>buffering 60%>>> software I've ever >>>buffering 70%>>> come across.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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
No, it's not a good thing, and you are completely wrong about Adobe.
Adobe has supported open source more than most people know (or care to believe).
I don't particularly like Adobe either, but as a company, they aren't half bad. They have released the postscript and PDF specs, in full, for free, and the license allows anyone to write an implementation of them, without royalty or encumberment.
This has been an incredible boon for open source and Free Software. If you think printing in Linux sucks now, just imagine how bad it would have been had Adobe been dicks about PS and PDF standards. Adobe is way ahead of the game...
They realized they can make more money by getting a fully open standard adopted, rather than trying to force a closed standard down everyone's throats, and face competing standards that do basically the same time.
We would be downloading 3rd party open source postscript and PDF interperters from overseas to avoid patents, like we have to do now with mplayer codecs.
What Real is doing is a sham. They don't give a fuck about Free Software, this is just their way of trying to get in on that "Linux thing" without actually giving a little.
I know that Elcomsoft ordeal has left a bad taste in people's mouths, but we can't forget that Adobe isn't an unconditional enemy, they have been a strong ally in the past, and hopefully they saw the error in their ways regarding the DMCA.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Nothing difficult about making a good GUI? I give you exhibit A: MPlayer. Dozens of different UIs available, all terrible.
Nothing difficult about network code for streaming media? Huh? You've got to deal with client/server communication over a lossy connection using UDP, doing retransmission of packets, buffering, doing scalable switching between streams. Doing this well is at least of the same order of difficulty as a good codec.
My video compression blog
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:
- Streaming server running on Linux
- Encoder running on Linux
- Players for Linux (including Alpha, PowerPC and IA32 architectures) and a few other Unix-type systems: Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Mac OS X.
- 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.
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.
Photoshop has to be THE most pirated piece of software on the internet. Does Adobe know this? Yes. Do they do much? No. Why? Because they realize that they are getting everybody hooked on it. And when these people go to their job, and need to use graphics software, what are they gonna say to the person who buys it? "Get me Adobe Photoshop." I mean, aside from freelancers, corporations are the only ones willing to pony up the 600 bucks or whatever it runs these days. And you know what? Last I checked, Adobe wasn't doing half bad financially. The RIAA and other companies could learn something from them.
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Getting the code is admittedly more complicated than it needs to be (and we're working on that), but hyperbole like the parent post should not be modded up as "Informative". The steps are:
1. Sign up for the site, filling in a form with proposed user name, real name, company name, and email.
2. Receive confirmation URL, and visit included URL
3. Agree to site terms of use
4. Agree to RPSL (an OSI certified license)
5. Get source code via CVS/SSH
Why are we being hardasses about making sure that people agree to licenses? It's a combination of the way the legal system works, and our general conservativeness that stems from being a publicly traded company.
There are good reasons to ensure that "manifestation of assent" occurs, even for open source. I'll defer to Larry Rosen's excellent paper on the topic. Larry, as you may know, is the General Counsel for the Open Source Initiative, and while his opinion is only an opinion, it's a very well informed one.
As for the functionality, it's more than just "shells". There's complete software there, and it's the foundation of our commercial products. Additionally, the combination of Ogg Vorbis, SMIL 2.0, JPEG, GIF, and PNG is very powerful, and *all open source*. No RealAudio/RealVideo necessary, and the app is pretty unique. For an example which plays in the Helix Player (and versions of RealPlayer/RealOne Player with the Ogg Vorbis codec installed), check out the following link:
http://rtsp.org/2003/demos/oggsmil/oggdemo.smil
Once one starts looking at SMIL (especially SMIL 2.0), you begin to realize that a system that can support it does a lot.
Rob Lanphier
Helix Community Coordinator