Real Announces Helix Grant Winners

elaineg writes "We're happy to announce the 2003 Helix Community Grant Program winners for development of open source projects on Helix. They are to UC Santa Barbara for providing robust multicast support in Helix, the Justin Karneges and Ulrich Staudinger at the Jabber Foundation for Jabber/Helix integration, Robert Kaye at MusicBrainz for integrated metadata cleanup in the Helix DNA Client, Jesse Schell at Carnegie Mellon University for integrating the Panda3D game and simulation engine with Helix, and the Xiph.org Foundation for further R&D and support of Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora codecs, including Helix DNA platform integration. More details can be found in the press release. Also, in vaguely related news, we've released Milestone 2 of the Helix Player for Linux." Helix styles itself as "the first open multi-format platform for digital media creation, delivery and playback", and has been created by Real Networks.

Comments

Just wanted to remind people....

[herrvinny]

...about the prevailing consensus about Real on /.

By the way, here's the /. article about the launch of the Helix player contest.

Re:Helix Player milestone 2

[DA-MAN]

Here is the direct link for the download!

http://forms.helixcommunity.org/helixdnaclient/

Here is a quick tutorial on making an rpm of it.
http://fedoranews.org/tchung/helixplayer/

And since there is no Windows version of the HelixPlayer, here is the link to the RealOne Player:

http://www.realone.com/R/RC.012004realhome_1_1_2_1 _1_2.ecomm...R/forms.real.com/real/realone/realone .html?beta_bypass=true&bbits=true&type=dlrhap_bb&& pp=home&src=012004realhome_1_1_2_1_1_2

Whither Ogg Theora?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'm beginning to think Xiph may fade and disappear at this rate. The Theora mailing lists appear to be dead, there've been no 'Ogg Traffic' updates for a couple of months, and Theora's still at "Alpha 2" half-a-year after it was originally scheduled to be "finished"....

I'd played with the alphas and liked the video and sound quality. Seemed like a really promising format, so hopefully they won't let Theora languish and will use some of the grant money to get back to work on it, but I wouldn't hold my breath...

Re:Whither Ogg Theora?

[vikman]

Actually, Theora support in Helix Player is almost ready :) Look for it in a nightly build soon. The milestone schedule will change to show it when it gets in. Thanks to the support of our users and community, there are somethings that have gone faster than expected within the project.

Re:What is this crap?

[brain159]

Immediately underneath their blue cross-bar under their tab navigation stuff, at the right, are the magic words "Free RealOne Player".

If you look closely in the Preferences dialog you can also disable the "check for new messages" junk which is also a major source of pissing-everyone-off.

Re:They should have more screenshots.

[rgammon_real]

The UI is written in glade, and the helix engine is wrapped in a GtkWidget-based GObject.

This makes it easy to create your own UI or even custom player

UI feedback is welcome on the users mailing list, users@player.helixcommunity.org, which you can subscribe to on https://player.helixcommunity.org.

Re:Totally Lost

[rgammon_real]

The easiest way to get the source is here.

You want the "01/21/04" table, "source" row, "HelixPlayer" column.

You should be able to build this tarball by untarring it and typing make.

It'd also be a good idea to subscribe to the dev@player.helixcommunity.org mailing list here

You can also ask questions on irc.helixcommunity.org channel #player if you have feedback, or need a hand with the build system.

Hope to see you on the mailing lists!

Re:Call me a skeptic, but Real...

[kforeman]

Guys, its really simple. Over 65% of our revenue now comes from consumer content services like RealOne SuperPass (content from CNN, ABCNEWS, Major League Baseball, etc) and Rhaposdy (streaming music service) This business model has allowed us to build great free(gratis) and open source (libre) software products, like the Helix Player. Kevin Foreman GM, Helix, RealNetworks

Re:What is this crap?

[kforeman]

We are building the industry's best Linux and open source media player. Yes, we haven't open source our RealAudio and RealVideo codecs because we can't. We don't own all of the IP inside of those codecs. However, the Helix Player with Ogg and SMIL support are 100% open source. Let me say that again. 100% open source. We are pleased to be working with the open source community to finally standardize on a legitimate media player that plays all formats, even those that are not open, like MP3, MPEG4, Flash, RealVideo 10, RealAudio 10, etc. Take Milestone 2 for a run at www.helixcommunity.org. Kevin Foreman GM Helix, RealNetworks