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?'"

Comments

Re:So why not QuickTime?

[Graff]

On my Windows XP boxes, QuickTime has been remarkably unstable through three major and countless minor releases. Crashes, weird artifacts that linger for the duration of playback, "corrupted" files that played fine under Win2K...

Yeah, imagine that. It makes you wonder why Quicktime has problems under Windows. I mean, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Quicktime competes with Windows Media Player, could it? There's no way Microsoft would stoop so low as to make Quicktime work badly on its systems! I mean it's not like anyone else ever had similar problems with Microsoft, right?

Sarcasm aside, maybe the answer is not to move towards a Windows Media Player solution for authoring, but rather away from it. If these guys have complaints about Real's actions with Real Player then they really should take a good hard look at the actions Microsoft has taken in the software market before they move to Windows Media Player.

Re:Very little car talk on "Car Talk"

[kevcol]

I agree, I can't stand 'Car Talk'. The constant "Nyuk nyuk nyuk" humor from these 2 clods gets old fast. They are about as entertaining as watching an old Jim "Hey Verne" Varney movie. No, actually they aren't quite up to that level.

Re:Why not just use MP3?

[Golias]

IMHO the main disadvantage of MP3 here is that it sucks at low bitrates...

"Car talk" is two guys discussing auto maintenence and telling old jokes. I'm sure Click & Clack are flattered to hear that you find their voices to be so pretty that you want to hear them in high fidelity, but most of us could be happy with a 56k MP3 stream.

Re:Realmedia

[drinkypoo]

We use realplayer where I work for educational video streaming, because it is cross-platform, widely available, and was picked for this role long ago. If you go into the RealOne (Or RP10) preferences and turn off some things, it becomes much less offensive. First, set the player to open the player only (no media guide) on launch, under the general settings. This will take care of all the little clicky doodad crap. Next, figure out where the assorted automatic options are, and turn off everything. I actually leave update checking turned on, because I like it when my software tells me when there is a new version available, but I have check for new messages and such off.

Once you do those things, realplayer will only show you ads which are provided to you in the video stream, which is to say, they are unavoidable. I agree that realplayer is garbage but these options are easy enough to find, and you have no excuse for not doing so and turning them off. Unless as your post suggests, you haven't installed it since the days when modems were hip and you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.