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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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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