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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.
That Org Vorbiss R&D is given an award. Its a good format IMO
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
...about the prevailing consensus about Real on /.
/. article about the launch of the Helix player contest.
By the way, here's the
If this one is anything to go by it looks like they may have created something better than the old players from hell.
Simply a menu bar, a playback area and some control buttons. Lovely.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Aaww well yes, they do suck, but I also remember a time when they were the only maker of serious software to play video on Linux, and I was really grateful to be able to play realaudio and realvideo files on my then badly supported pet OS.
...
I guess it's like a moped : when you're a kid, you feel the biggest guy in town on your little buzzing machine, then you get your driver's license and your first car, and your hate the thing for taking up so much space in the garage and stinking the place up with that awful gasoline stench. But remember you once liked it though
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here is the direct link for the download!
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
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_
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
...must have something up their sleeve. Everything Real has ever done has been user-hostile, with the express aim of taking control of your computer away from you.
Without some absurdly good justification (a new board of directors with Mother Theresa as chairperson?), I can't believe that Real would do anything "open" without an ulterior motive.
You seem to be saying that getting Realmedia to adopt open formats is a bad thing?
Sure, we'd all like all the codecs to be open but in the meantime proprietary+open is better than proprietary alone. Pre-existing proprietary codecs are never going to be opened. Whatever they or we want sorting out all the patents and licences to do so would be an unbelievable amount of effort. You can't just "undo" proprietary development like that.
What we can do however is help Realmedia see the value of Open formats here and now. We can't change their history but we can try and guide their future.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
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.
It plays almost everything I need it to play. As of pre3 the exception seems to be realaudio streams (which play but seem to lose sync after a while). I'm sure that'll be sorted out before long though - props to the developers!
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Look- everybody knows Real's mass market players have been horrible for quite some time. However, whenever anybody mentions Helix on /., any rational discussion is drowned out by a horde of people who haven't looked into Helix at all but want to get in their "R3AL I5 T3H 5UX0RZ!" me-too comment. Helix looks like a really solid effort, and the linux player is rather nice. Hopefully management will let them release a Windows port of the helix player as they intend to do.
Until the realaudio and realvideo formats are opened, integrating those other formats is just helping Realmedia Corp. co-opt the open formats.
Of you don't want groups to co-opt your open format, then don't release an open format.
I thought the whole point of open formats to be used?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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!
Check out Helix Player
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
Kevin Foreman
"So what?" Who needs Realmedia? There's a new, open-source player? So what? It might be useful for viewing the decaying Real content still out there on the net, but why should we promote the continued use of this crap?
What cross-platform content format would you suggest then? WMV is not an option due to it being windows-only (there's a mac version, but it's been discontinued). Quicktime has no linux version (though you can get it to run through crossover, but performance in that case of horrible). All the other formats are either not available on all platforms, unsuitable for streaming, or too difficult to get running.
Like it or not, in the real world, rm is the ONLY format that will easily play on all the major platforms.
Maybe if ogg theora or ogg tarkin ever get off the ground that will change, but given how ogg vorbis is still a niche player, despite it being a clearly superior and completely open/free format that has been out for quite a while, this seems incredibly unlikely.