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Real Launches New Player, Music Store

Posted by simoniker on from the making-an-effort? dept.

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.

3 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. HOLD THE PHONE by gnu-sucks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wo wo wo wait a sec. Real releases a new player and a new codec. That works on linux, developed in the helix community. That might not suck. And it plays iTunes encrypted songs.

    Will it do my laundry as well?

  2. Re:Alternate point of view by bbdd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this parent comment and some of the child comments bring up two sides of an interesting argument, namely:

    what does a software company who has lost your trust in the past have to do to regain it?

    for example, i am curious to see how well the intuit tax software does this season due to last year's debacle. what would they have to do to get you to switch back?

    in this case, how far would real have to go to make people interested again?

  3. My story I am sure is hardly unique. by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used RealPlayer when I first got my PC WAAAAY back in the day. I was unimpressed with the average video quality, and I was unimpressed with the clunky interface in the player. As a result, it didn't last out the week on my PC. I never reinstalled it for years afterward, as I never saw a need to.

    Last year, someone gave me a CD with a bunch of movies in .RM format on it, and me and my roommate at the time watched them together. I was forced to watch them with RealOne, as I didn't know about RealAlternative at the time. The movies would freeze at times, the player was a miserable experience. I would be doing whatever on my PC, and an ad would pop up advertising something I didn't want (at least you had the balls to admit that it was RealOne displaying the ad. Kudos for that.) The player was clunky, and although better than previous versions, my roommate was well used to me swearing at RealOne every time it froze, crashed, or even just hit the end of the current movie.

    The point I am trying to make here is that I have had nothing but bad experiences with RealPlayer. With RealAlternative, I can watch .RM files in Windows Media player without issue, and WMP is one of the few Microsoft products that I have to give kudos to. There just aren't many out there that are any better.

    The sad fact of the matter is that I do not feel like I SHOULD give RealPlayer 10 a chance. I don't like the .RM format, and I dislike the player. All the previous versions were horrible, and WMP does the job fine for me.