Slashdot Mirror
NPR's Car Talk Dumping RealMedia
olcrazypete writes: "Click and Clack are apparently fed up with Real Networks. They have switched to Windows Media Player format. 'Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we
finally decided to take action.' The whole story is here . My favorite line: 'It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?'"
Not that I would ever endorse anything from Apple, but their streaming media technology seems fairly competent.
Seriously though. These guys (Click and Clack) are Macheads so why not quicktime? The Quicktime streaming server fundamentals are under the Darwin open source and free paradigms, there are no licensing fees as there are with Windows, and hey, it's so easy to use. So, what gives?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Beat me to the punch on this. Nullsoft has had such an excellent grasp on audio and video streaming, I'm surprised more companies aren't jumping all over that wagon.
Back when Real Media was using the adult entertainment industry to get their hold on the streaming media market, they had a special link for adult websites that made it much more obvious how to download the free player. Of course back then finding the free player link from their main page wasn't so hard either.
Divx.com is guilty of the same thing. They have a free codec package that will work fine with Windows Media Player. But it isn't in their table of their three main products. Also if you do find it, and just go with the install default config options, you'll see a Divx watermark at the start of every video. This can be turned off easy enough from the "Decoder Configuration Utility".
I think the answer to that is that Windows Media is on almost every computer (including my Mac) and is _much_ easier to get (as the article points out). Joe user is going to be much more happy with that because all he really wants is to learn about his car.
It's free isn't it? It definitely sucks less than Windows Media.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I can't say that I blame them. I haven't had RealPlayer on any of my PCs for ages. I went to fetch the most recent incarnation a few days ago and was completely blown away that what ought to be a relatively simple audio/video streaming client had grown to be more than 14MB.
As much as it doesn't sit well with me, Media Player is included with Windows. It requires no downloads, it doesn't bombard me with ads, and it seems to work pretty well.
Here's the main reason they likely decided to use Windows Media instead of "free" alternatives or Quicktime: The people at Car Talk want to make it easy for their listeners to tune in. They know that the majority of PCs in the world already have the Windows Media Player sitting there on the desktop waiting to be clicked, or the plugin already tied to Internet Explorer.
The transition will therefore be as seamless as possible for the listeners -- a simple matter of "click here" and the program will play. No messing around with downloading new clients, configuring, or what have you.
Whether you (open source booster) think this is right or wrong is another matter entirely.
This is offtopic I know but NPR leftest?
I'm a Conservative/Moderate and I listen to NPR, I feel that their news is the best and least biased around because they are non-profit, they don't have to worry about keeping one side or the other happy.
The best thing about NPR is that they don't try to hype news to get me to listen. Cable news makes me sick with the way they twist the truth in teasers to get you to tune in to whatever is next by playing with your emotions. NPR treats me like an intellegent person and lets me decide for myself. I don't always agree with them but I never feel like they are trying to get me to either.
The Anti-Blog
And for that matter, to be fair to Real, the the Helix server/player/tools are also Open/Free (both Speech and Beer).
That doesn't really address the 'free Real player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night' comment... Real's own employees have bitched about that for years, God knows the rest of us have. Hopefully that gives the Open movement within Real (the Helix Community) a little more leverage in selling their case to the more hardline business folk still trying to figure out why their user base is evaporating.
OTOH, I'm a bit pissed off... I have a free Real player (with all the source) that works great. Thanks Click and Clack, I can't listen to your program anymore. That 'free' windows player comes with a $200 Windows tax attached.
Nothing like a damned fool 'statement' that flies in the face of common sense.
Monty
Why can't they just offer downloadable MP3s? They're not for profit. It also tend to save bandwidth to do it that way over streaming (less likely to send the same thing twice if a person rewinds, or stops and starts, or multiple people listen sequenially)? I'd love to have click-and-clack MP3s.
If microsoft didn't have a monopoly to spread their media player, trust me it would nag you for credit card numbers just as much as all the other crap does. If you're using Windows Media Player, you've either pirated it or you've already given Microsoft your credit card number when you purchased windows (most likely a computer pre-installed with windows).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
To me file types are like a langauge. They should be free and open. Could you imagine the mess we'd be in if we had to pay a fee to use the english language. Or if someone kept it hidden so that it could only be used with their translators. For the man that could patent it, it would be a gold mine.
Not only is NPR rather balanced (I personally used to listen to it every day in the car when I lived outside of the city), but people who listen to NPR as their main source of information have been shown to have less misconceptions about the war in Iraq than people who listen to or watch other news sources.
Interestingly enough, the study found that people who watched Fox News had the most misconceptions.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
Bah, why confuse things with facts?
Seriously, though, do you expect them to back up a joke like that with notes on all of microsoft's wrongdoings?
You could click "don't open homepage when started" at preferences... From now on, while installing a media player, click "custom install", YES, they are designed to do such things.
;)
Your windows media 9 is corrupt so that it doesn't open windowsmedia.com by default? And of course the popups?
Oh come on...
Damn, I should have filtered Real stories somehow, burn karma burn!
I promptly uninstalled the garbage.
You installed it in the first place?
RealPlayer my ass. AdPlayer more like it. You get this huge window full of advertisements and flashy widgets, and maybe 10% of the window is covered by actual video in blocky, shitty quality that jumps and skips constantly. Even Windows Media Player, for all its DRM crap, has the majority of the window covered by the video.
I remember back when I had phone line modem that video would pause every few seconds as RealPlayer loaded up more ads. Of course it wouldn't just pause, it would skip those parts of the movie.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I have done the same thing with Gallery, having people that use the printing services donate to the project. Is it that big of a mystery that when you treat customers right they do pay you back and keep you going? Besides, it helps cut down on your PR costs.
I would agree with you, of course, if we are discussing VoIP/SIP/RTP - TCP is worthless there - but broadcasts are just fine over TCP, and no dropouts :-)
Most people are easy marks when they are dealing with an unfamiliar subject. If your doctor prescribes a drug for your condition, what will you do if you are not a doctor yourself? Buy it and become an "easy mark", or refuse and potentially die? I think I know a most common answer to that.
I've never been satisfied with Quicktime or RealAudio and never realy have had problems with WM player.
Thats the way it is and I believe M$ should have been broken up so that 3rd party apps at least have a chance to be competative.
As it is right now, 3rd party apps targetted by Microsoft simply cannot compete and make money and I don't have time in my life to wrestle with products continously being sabatoged by MS, crippled ware or little used variants.
Well, the web site I could live with, seein' as you can eventually find the free link. Waste of time and lame, yes, but still... it's a one time affair.
What really got my goat when I could last be arsed to try RealOne, though, was that it was the worst annoy-ware ever. None of the obvious options seemed to convince it that
1. no, I do _not_ want it to keep pre-loading itself, and
2. no, I don't want to be spammed with their lame pop-ups... even when I'm not even watching and realmedia files any more, and have manually removed all file associations to it
It was _not_ convincing me to fork over the dough for the premium version. Au contraire, it just served to convince me that I _don't_ want to "vote with the wallet" that such lame practices continue.
Now mind you, this was some two versions back, so I don't know if they fixed it or not in the meantime. But still, it's left such a bitter taste in my mouth, that I don't want to have anything to do with them again. Ever.
And just for the sake of having a good rant, what the **** is with all these business models based on annoying the potential customer? I can understand that they need money, but then don't bloody advertise it as "FREE!!!"
The whole thing is as if I advertised "FREE MP3 players!" Only once you've got one, I started showing up at your house, reading your diary, making a list of what music you're playing, listening to your phone conversations (the non-Internet equivalent of what spyware does to a TCP/IP connection), and shouting in front of your window to give me money if you want me to shut up. Even when you're not actually using that MP3 player.
Surely noone would put up with that kind of a trick, for a non-computer product. But in the software world it's become accepted and expected that, hey, the user is a computer-illiterate anyway. You're _expected_ to sell him/her snake oil, rape his/her privacy as hard as you can, never test or debug the product first, and generally be as annoying or dishonest as possible if it makes you money. etc. How did this happen?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have to disagree. It's not because Quicktime on anything other than the Mac eats ass, it's because Quicktime just plain eats ass.
.avi and .wmv files are much, much more common than .mov files.
At one point, up until the final version 2 release (I believe 2.5.x), QuickTime was a pretty solid software suite. The player had an extremely compact GUI, a good featureset for the time, and was stable. It wasn't commercial, and didn't constantly beg for money. It even had MIDI support.
Then came the dark, dark days of version 3. At some point, presumably buoyed by the fact that their System 7.5+ CD player interface had used a custom WDEF and other widgets, some "UI designer" on the Apple media team was given free rein. As far as I can guess, said designer was from the hardware team, because that was the beginning of The Great Apple Interface Starting To Suck. QuickTime 3 had nonstandard widgets, and used an ugly, less functional brushed metal interface. Version 4 was worse, and the downward trend continued. QuickTime eventually required idiotic contortions to get the controls to work ("He he...knobs are cool, and all those amateur WinAMP skinners do them -- we should add a volume knob!") I don't even need to mention the ridiculous idea of the Favorites drawer. The Windows interface was truly appalling. For a company that is clearly capable (or at least once was) of designing Very Good Interfaces and got violently pissy about Microsoft producing poor UIs on their Mac releases (think Word 6), Apple did a stupendously poor job of implementing their Windows media player client. There was little excuse for the floating menu bar other than pure arrogance -- simply refusing to recognize another platform's interface standards. At first, they could get away with this, because Microsoft's own Video for Windows blew chunks. However, Microsoft steadily improved, and Apple managed to convince itself that nobody could ever challenge QuickTime dominance.
Now, QuickTime is reduced to extremely annoying nagware/shareware with an interface that has only marginally improved since the Bad Days after version 2.x. Aside from Apple-hosted movie trailers, most end users don't run into it a heck of a lot. This is, for once, absolutely not an area where Apple lost due to Microsoft playing dirty. Apple lost because Apple did a poor job of serving users. Now,
(I'd also like to repeat my personal irritation with Apple actively pulling another QuickTime with its insistance on the single mouse button. Once again, they have people at the company who are arrogant enough to think that they can dictate to the user what the user will use and can ignore user complaints. They've still refused to accept the fact that they can do this only in the short run.)
It may just be because Apple is a big company, and big companies tend to do this, but it seems like Apple tries overly hard to leverage anything it produces ("this is really nice, but you have to use it on *our* terms"), and ends up killing it off. The few really impressive, new things that Apple has produced that haven't been leveraged to death seem to be suffering abandonment -- Speech Manager development sure isn't what it used to be, and OpenDoc got put into maintenance mode.
The last time I can remember Apple listening to popular demand was with standardizing windoids, and they took forever to do so, waiting until everyone else was using them. If poor reliability is Microsoft's Achilles' heel, arrogance is Apple's. (And disinterest in implementing boring features and maintaining backwards compatibility Linux's -- only on Linux does one hear "hey, we're doing a new minor kernel release soon -- let's require every vendor with a USB device driver to rewrite it!".)
May we never see th
Slashdot is not a research facility, it's not a debtate, it's an informal discussion, and you can't come in and demand that people involved in the discussion be less biased - accept that this is the tone of the group, and if you want to, join in.
No one's forcing you to read....
content management for designers
If what they say is true why aren't they just using an MP3 stream? that works everywhere. Could it be this has something to do with their hosting company being a big Windows 2000 server farm?
I was just thinking the same thing. Winamp Shoutcast (although a little funny) or IceCast would work great. I have been playing with this stuff myself (check my homepage -err rather don't my little box can't handle more that a few streams) and the standard MP3/M3U combo works great. Am I missing something? Or are these people just not "with it" and have to spend money and go with a propriatary system. I have not used one of these streaming media packages but my fooling around with pure audio is great. Every damn player I have used can deal with good ol MPEG audio and I have messed with streaming MPEG video. MPEG1 at 336 is just about as good/ little better that news.com's Windows Media at 220 plus it plays everywhere and best of all, Bill isn't involved.
Can someone enlighten me please... I have been trying to figure this out and I just don't get it.
This is the reason I removed realplayer from my systems. Along with comet cursor Real inc has the distinction of being one of the few sites I have blocked using the 'parental filter' feature of my firewall. I don't want anyone else downloading that crap onto my systems either.
One of the depressing facts of comp sci is that everything gets copied blind. I have no idea why every 'mejaah player' feels the need to support sixty different 'skins' none of which support the native look and feel of the machine O/S. I'm not a 14 year old kid, I want a tool not a kalaidescope.
I use media player because it has the fewest whizz-bang features of any of the players - you still have to turn some off. It also does a pretty good job of buffering enough content to play without jitter most of the time.
One thing I have never quite worked out is why the audio/video sync on so many players is so poor. That is the one feature that has the single biggest effect on quality. Even with a really fat pipe I usually end with a lag of about 2 secs at the end of a lot of clips.
This stuff is not rocket science you know.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
And NO, I am not going to suggest they use Ogg - yes, it would be free, MP3s not, but I'm trying to stay on-point that WMA is bad, not muddy the issue with a format that Click and Clack may never have heard of, and certainly a large portion of their audience has not heard of.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The -dumpstream parameter will give better results.
As if 1 out of 100 people outside tech even know what slashdot is. Don't give it too much credit...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy