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Real Launches New Player, Music Store
kforeman writes "You may have heard Real's
many announcements today, including the release of RealPlayer 10
with vastly improved codecs, as well as our new Music Store. As a
result of the player engine being developed in the Helix
community, we're able to offer the benefits of the new RealAudio
and RealVideo in
in the Helix Player for Linux. We read Slashdot here at Real, especially when the
subject of our company or technology comes up, so we know some of you
may not have liked recent versions of our player. This release
represents a much friendlier direction for us; more options that were
'opt-out' are now 'opt-in'. In developing RealVideo 10,
our codec team has been working closely with the Doom9 community, and
has been posting
updates to that forum (look for references to RV9-EHQ). The tests
that have been performed by that community show RealVideo doing
quite well against the competition." There's a CNET News article discussing the announcements, including the jukebox's ability to play "secure downloads from the iTunes store", for those looking for another point of view.
I'll just stick to RealAlternative, thanks.
Regarding the opt-out issues, Real's biggest problem was not so much that most of the items were opt-out, but that they hid the real opt-out items in a scrollable form where the visible options on the top were already unchecked. Unless you paid attention and made sure you scrolled through all the options, you may think you were opting out because everything you could see was unchecked, but there were 9 or 10 more nasty items checked below that.
The takeover issue is another big problem, which neither WMP nor Winamp have. Overall, Real has honestly earned their terrible reputation, and I for one will never trust them. Goodbye, Real.
There are good media players out there, you just need to know what to look for and where.
Media Player Classic (MPC) is a shining example of a solid, simple player with a good feature set.
Since you're probably interested in being able to play most video formats, you'll want to download Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative to save you the hassle of installing the invasive Quicktime and Real players. Both QT and Real alternative are codecs rather than full blown players, and allow you to view their respective video formats in MPC.
Top it off with the DivX and XviD codecs, and you should be able to play pretty much anything under the sun with the exception of DVDs.
Unfortunatly I don't know of a free codec that can play DVDs, thanks to the RIAA's work on DeCSS. If you have a registered DVD decoder package, you'll probably be able to use MPC with it's supplied codec.
You can now play all your videos in a single place without sacraficing your privacy.
I hope that helps.
Clicked the button in my freedesktop.org KDE/Gnome menu and it worked.
No spam, popups, system tray crap, or anything else in the Linux version. Though they should
Here's the package, by the way, for Fedora Core 1.
Here's the source package
If the files aren't there right now, they will be soon.
Then read this:
enough already. I went to real.com and I couldn't find a download link that didn't require an account (creditcard info - cancel within 14 days OR ELSE).
On a hunch I clicked on service (it's your core business, not some cuddly extra!) and there I could download realplayer 10. Of course, a crappy installer which first decompresses files ("preparing to install") which later need to be decompressed, but that's about standard on windows. So the installer finally pops up with a license agreement. Pretty preposterous terms, including "delete this in 120 days" and "we can revoke your license with 14 days notice" bullshit, and that's even disregarding whole sections on DRM and autoupdates. Not very open-sourcy!
Then I have to remove checks from checkboxes because you want to give me a zillion shortcuts (including Free Offers? v.iagra?)..
Then it won't let me unselect all filetypes except real, unless I click advanced.. Sure, that's not pushy AT ALL..
Then a fucking toolbar.. Then I have to creat an account?? WTF?? fake@example.com is already registered, damn it.. Then another ad.
Only NOW do I get the UI of real player itself. And another ad! Close it down, start it again. Another ad (realguide)!
I notice MessageCenter (SPAM) is still there, and enabled by default. Fucking spamware.
MediaPlayerClassic install: download. Run. If I like it, register the filetypes in the options menu (perhaps a bit leet for newbies, but doable).
No bloat. No ads. No built-in spammy shortcuts. No stealthily installed and enabled popup ads. No non-standard confusing and icky looking non-themed widgets. A tenth the size. Just add codecs. Give Mplayerc.exe and a decent codec pack and three lines of instructions to my mom, et voila, even she can install it.
MediaPlayerClassic is GNU GPL. How about real patch it up with some real streaming, release some codec, and ok, make an installer for it (a NON-hijacking one).
The ONLY thing I like about this realplayer is the page with a lot of radio stations (kind of like shoutcast, AHEM).. The thing I don't like is it loading some stupid webpage when I click on a live365 feed (with NO warning).
Even windows media player and iTunes are better behaved than Real, and the open source players beat it hands down for being polite and respectful.
And you sir, lured me into downloading a spammy ad-laden piece of hijacking crap under the pretense that it was finally cleaned up. I'm not calling you a liar, but I was mislead by statements you represented as factual truths, which are not.
That's me (and anyone who listens to me) done installing anything from Real.com for the next five years, unless I hear from 3 independent parties that it doesn't suck anymore.