Slashdot Mirror
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.
my problem isnt in the "opt-out" issues in your player. I've gotten used to having to opt-out of just about everything. My problem is with its chronic takeover of my media, inherent bloat and general slowness, and its over-affinity for my ram. Though I cant say that many other windows-based media players are better.
.
Put any software that can be labelled as spyware in your product, become an instant pariah. I'm already VERY wary of any Real-player-related product.
Ryan Fenton
Real's actions seem to be mirroring Netscape's very closely. FIrst in order to compete with Microsoft, the go open source. Next they sue Microsoft for antitrust violations. Now they are in a fighting for survival in a market dominated by others. Hope fully this will turn out better for them.
Does anyone know if they updated the Mac version, and if so, does it play iTunes Store files there?
Then I hope you read this. RealOne was one of the most offensive pieces of software I've ever installed on my system. I eventually managed to get rid of it and put on an older player, but some Real content just doesn't play without the new player. As a result, I simply avoid content for Real Player. Haven't really missed it. I rather expect that many Slashdot readers feel as I do.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Seriously. Make your player not look like a pile of dog shit that was in the microwave for 10 minutes too long. When I install your software, I want to install that: your software. NOT a free trial of AOL, and furthermore, your player should speak only when spoken to (i.e. not get greedy and put itself in the menu bar and load on startup) and really, I only need one shortcut to it on my computer, not one on the desktop, one in the menu bar, one in the start button...etc.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll stick to iTunes. You say you guys at Real read Slashdot? Put your money where your mouth is.
I don't think the "sponge" can hold any more water. Real doesn't exactly have a positive consumer outlook with *anyone* and that is what is needed to survive. Perhaps they should concentrate and using their talent to develop a player people want to use (and pay for.. how do you comptete with WinAmp or iTunes which are free....) before worrying about this extra crap.
I am glad to see that the Windows real player is taking a more "player" like stance, not a big billboard that happens to include video. It has been putting off our adoption of realplayer. I'd suggest elimination of the "marketing blitz" on the player, as websites don't want viewers to have to view 50 popups and various registration just to play our content! It's bad enough to ask them to download a player, but to ask them to be subjected to that? People don't want to buy "Pro", they don't want viagra, they don't want more spam, they don't want to be forced to register the player... all they want to do is to be able to view our content! Although we hate windows media, it is installed on much more of our viewers than realplayer and generally just acts as a player... which is leaning us that way.
Hear hear. Real Networks had a shot in 98' to do it right and they opted for the "we will take over your operating system and destroy it" syndrone. The "creative geniuses" in their boardroom should be making lattes at Starbucks. Real Networks = Future playbook on how to make every conceivable wrong move under the sun. I root for almost anyone playing against Microsoft, but it would divine intervention for these guys to get crushed under the boot and extinguished in a puff of smoke.
Your player will *never* be accepted under GNU/Linux until you open source your codecs and license your patents in an open source friendly way. What's wrong with releasing your codecs under the GPL and saying any GPL'd software can make use of the code any way it likes? All your competitors will avoid patented GPL code as if it's the flesh eating disease. But the GNU/Linux community will consider you da bomb! Don't just think about it. *DO* it!
I see a lot of people posting negative comments about the Real player and policies. I'm not much of a windows user, so I can't really judge. I also haven't thoroughly tried out the new Real release, so I can't tell you if they're doing what they say they're doing. On the other hand, I don't think anyone posting about how awful Real is has done so, either.
As far as I'm concerned, it's your actions now and the trust you can give me for your future actions that affect my opinion of you. If Real is really changing their ways, going for faster and more open codecs, and moving away from forcing me to sign my life away to install a media player, is that something we want to discourage?
The jury is still out on what the new player and registration scheme is like. But as far as I'm concerned, if Real can learn from their mistakes and bad PR to turn around and do the right thing, they should be proud of what they're doing, the editors of Slashdot should be proud of having made a positive difference, and we should be applauding them, not denigrating them.
So let's wait to see their new stripes before we go hunting them.
How is this insightful? Is no company able to ever improve? People keep bringing up the fact that IBM used to be the Enemy yet is now one of the biggest friends to the open source community, but Real has no possible way they can improve?
On the other hand, they said they're reading Slashdot. If comments like the parent are what they've been seeing, maybe they just decided to ignore public opinion, since so much of it seems to be pointless criticism.
Everybody seems to be whining about what a bloaded piece of crap the current RealPlayer is, how it eats system resources, changes your settings, can't be gotten rid of, and installs a pile of spyware. I don't know how much of that is true of the Windows version, but the Mac version is pretty benign. It doesn't change system settings I don't want it to, it doesn't run automatically in the background, uninstallation is as simple as dragging the single icon from the Applications folder to the Trash, and it uses less RAM than AIM, Safari, Mail, iTunes or even Terminal.
The most annoying thing is that it requires you to sign up for an account on real.com with an e-mail address and password. What's the point of this? It's a hassle, the first time you set it up.
Another minor annoyance is that the application quits when you close the window, and you can't have more than one window open simultaneously, but that's forgivable.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
When it comes to their player...I'll have to agree with you. RealOne has been a major disappointment. I hope they can raise the quality of their player. And this quality can be raised by not adding more and more bloat, but streamlining the interface so it stays out of the way as much as possible. Of course, that's my own opinion. But I think more than a few would agree with me on the bloat issue.
You guys should really all stop holding grudges against Real. Sure, back in the days of 1998-2001 they were all about making money off of advertising, but who wasn't? It's their fault for not reacting quickly enough to fix this, but they're obviously working on doing things right.
RM9 was actually a pretty damn decent codec and was pretty good at doing video at reasonably small file sizes. Quicktime is really bad at resizing its size (try downloading a trailer from Apple's website on "large" and then click on the Maximize button. At least on QTWin, the resulting picture is really bad, even though you started with a pretty good source image. You generally don't have this problem with Divx, xvid, or anything else really). Although Windows media actually isn't a bad piece of tech anymore, it's inherently evil in many ways, and that's enough for me to stop using it.
Let's look at what Real is trying to do now: they're trying to gain technical superiority with better codecs, and as far as I'm concerned, more power to 'em. They're also trying to reduce the blatant advertising they have on their site and in their client; the more of this the better, this was everyone's #1 complaint about Real anyway. They're still continuing on with their helixcommunity OSS stuff, which seems to be an attempt at being more open. Nothing in those three seem really negative to me.
In fact, if you think about it, Real is probably the most crossplatform thing out there. Windows Media is obviously focused on Windows, and lesser so on Mac. Quicktime is obviously focused on Mac, and a slightly lesser degree on Windows. Both of those have zero Linux support. Real's got RP8 on Linux and all those helix builds too. Though mplayer can do all three (w00t), it isn't an official product from any of them, so I wouldn't count that as adding crossplatform capability.
Granted, Real's got a big frigging hole to dig out of, one that they only dug themselves. But at least they're trying, and if they keep this up, they might do a pretty damn good job too. Let's at least keep an open mind while they try.
Has always been a MUCH better experience for me than on Windows. Maybe it is because all those things people really hate about realplayer can only occur in a Windows environment or maybe they just figure the community wouldn't stand for it.
Anyway, it doesn't seem to make sense ranting and bashing Realplayer when you have partially already decided to be treated like a mindless consumer by your choice in operating systems.
Before you flame me, tell me that all adware or nasty take-control-ware would disappear from Windows if Realplayer were to suddenly disappear.
Face it, it is like spam. For every one of you who got sick of it and just figured a way to uninstall it, 10 other windows users just gave up and decided to live with it.
Maybe if you want software companies to behave differently, you should come to terms with what REALLY is most important about the software you use.
'cause it seems more and more that Microsoft is the only company these days that can make money off of software the good ol' fasion way.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Me too.
.rm files I have floating around. Once I have this, I'll have no need of Real Networks anymore.
So that I don't add a unhelpful ``me too'' post to the world, I'll elaborate. I use Win95c (when I use Windows, I'm mostly Linux now). Typically I need to reboot once every week or so. It runs this long because I have a very limited set of programs that I run from Windows. Firebird, Zmud, and Irfanview account for 99% of what Windows gets to run. Opening RealPlayer is a guarantee that I'll have to reboot within 24 hours or so, assuming it doesn't outright crash. I'm through with RealPlayer. It doesn't matter how good Real's new player is, nor does it matter how good Real's new codec is. I'm not going to sit here and passively wait on Real (or Microsoft, for that matter) to get their shit together. I'm actively searching for a replacement so that I can play (or convert) the few
Here's a free tip, guys at Real: release the specs for your old codecs so that nobody has to use your player anymore.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
How was actually locating the exe to install? In my past experience with installing RealPlayer, the install was the minor part, and 99% of the bother consisted of trying to navigate Real's labyrinth-like frequently-changing website to find the series of three tiny links in successive pages that would take you to the page where you select your platform and download an installer, while huge, deceptive buttons that make you think they lead to the free version try to lure you off path and into whereever it is that Real sells you their Super Premium Ultra products which requires a credit card number to continue.
Really, this is the part that made me get to the point that now, if someone gives me a media url, if it can't be played in Quicktime or VLC I just don't bother.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Click on Free Player.
View page about the non-free player.
Find hidden link for Free Player.
View another page advertising the non-free player.
Find hidden link for Free Player...
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Um... WMP takes up a lot more than 6MB, you just can't see it directly because it's all in the core system.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Okay, so if I ignore the annoy-ware and spy-ware issues, I still have problems with the basic operation of Real Player. Two to be exact:
1. It is slow to respond to user input, even when it is the only thing running. I admit that a 300 MHz machine is not blindingly fast by todays standards, but Real Player should at least be usable in this environment.
2. Crashes - I can't listen for more than about 20 minutes without it locking up. Sometimes only the program, sometimes Win-98. Frustrating enough to keep one from even trying to use the software.
If only there was a Winamp plugin to play ".rm" files..........
--
Just my $0.02
I just tried to download the Helix Player Binary. I again needed to accept a license which states:
...
2. LICENSE RESTRICTIONS.
a) You may not: (i) permit other individuals to use the Software except under the terms listed above; (ii) modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or use any other method (including "clean room" development) to learn the source code of the Software
So, if I agree to that license, does that mean I am never ever again allowed to do a clean room implementation for any Real formats?
Thanks for any thoughts about this.
Why should I pay for the right to use a media player which I dont even need?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Okay I found a substitute for Real Player. Have not yet tried to use it, but the site note reads:
a lterna tive.htmt ernative/p rivate/1.11a re/04_data.ht ml
Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files. This way you can play RealMedia files without having to install the RealPlayer/RealOne Player. You do need a player that is capable of playing RealMedia and the included Media player Classic supports it and works very well.
Check out:
http://reformed-theology.org/downloads/real
http://lekkerekwal.com/downloadz/RealAl
http://home.wi.rr.com/johnhood/freew
$0.99/song and $9.95/album
and Hi-MD with 1GB capacity. The new MD walkmans cost $200 to $400.
Interesting to see how Apple would respond.
I don't think Real has done anything all that bad in the past. They are a company, guys! They are going to have make money to stay in business. Advertisement is one of the common ways a company tries to collect revenue without having to charge the user money. If you disliked this so much, did you ever write them even a single email telling them so? If so, you are part of the problem -- complaining to yourself accomplishes nothing.
I applaud Real's attempt to make a player that is better than the next guy and is attempting to be free. I've worked for a few companies now, and I know that getting everyone to agree on making something GPL is most often laughable. It takes a big culture change. Reward those who make that culture change with kind words, don't be rude!
Consider the guy who was on the fence when these decisions were being made. If he read half of these comments he'd just think that these people just want the software for free, they care about nothing else! (He might even be right.)