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

Its good to see

[HappyCitizen]

That Org Vorbiss R&D is given an award. Its a good format IMO

They should have more screenshots.

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Re:Wow...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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 ...

What the?

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

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...

/. conformism wins out over independent thought?

[jensend]

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.

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