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Real's Reality
"There's also an interesting conversation going on at Jogin.com, which started with this post from the author, basically a rant, describing how inconvenient and even hostile Real Player is. It would be like any other rant, except an employee of Real Networks replied with some insights into the company's wrongdoings and somewhat explained Real's undeterred hostility towards those who downloaded the free version of its player. Furthermore, a consultant, who used to work at Real Networks, replied, sharing some questionable practices Real engaged in, such as hiding a variety of "add-ons" at the bottom of the page, hoping that the user would not scroll down to un-check the selections, and then charging his credit card for add-ons when he signed up for paid version on Real One."
Their player hijacked your system. At least RealOne played a little nicer. It still has that dynamic app that constantly wants to access the Internet. I have to kill it with ZoneAlarm quite frequently. I agree with this article. Real's problems aren't caused by Microsoft, it's REAL . . .
With their helix community effort, they are trying to gain the benefits of being open while keeping the core parts secret. However, to become the standard, they should make the full featured helix server freely open source and fully free - with no restrictions/purchases/restrictive 'binary-only' non-commercial licenses. This will allow them to establish a non-Microsoft standard, allowing them to compete in the marketplace on a equal playing field, selling products such as helix video encoders and "pro" real players.
Can anyone post a link to some OSS codecs server/players for OSS streaming video?
I really don't know if there are any like an XviD/ogg type steaming media we could all push to become popular.
please, we need to stop this madness.
this is unrelated to the hidden paid add-ons, but when using the free player, you get a list of add-ons you want (add to favourites, desktop shortcut, etc etc), the first 4 are unchecked by default, but if you scroll down there are more, which ARE checked. very sneaky if you ask me. they could have easily increased the size of the viewable list from 4 items
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I once bought a legal version of RealPlayer back in 1999, and it worked great. But as soon as the new version came out, it seemed like my paid for copy started acting screwy, like Real had written code into it so it would work badly as soon as a new version (which would have to be bought again) was available for purchase. Even reinstalling fresh on a fresh install of Windows didn't work in getting back that "flawless" operation. Obviously I can't prove it, but I always got the feeling they purposely wrote destructiveness into the player to force purchases of new versions. Just my take on it.
So now I use Windows Media Player.
From TAL's site...
We recognize there are issues with RealAudio - but there are other quirks with Windows RealMedia Player and other formats, too. And the "free" technologies some of you have kindly suggested have their own costs - mainly, they still require staff time (particularly time to convert our many, many shows) and server/bandwidth space, which are in very short supply here. We promise that we've investigated many options, and have chosen what we think is the best, and really, the only viable solution. Recognizing that we can't make everyone happy, we do the best we can, as we keep our promise to offer TAL shows free online.
As bloated and useless as it is, you have to respect Real for being one of the first major companies to release their software for Linux. They saw how they were easily forced out of the Windows market, so they saw an easy (in their minds) opportunity to gain market share where MS would dare not tread. But with all the all-in-one media players for Linux (Mplayer, xine, etc), Real has no niche in the Linux community. In addition, they have virtually no hope in their player being bundled in Linux distros, unless they decide to GPL it (not gonna happen).
Get that, Real? Some of us avoid your products because of your policies and would rather not see the cute little movie rather than give in. Enjoy your bottom line.
The start menu is fine. Expected, in fact; I'd be bothered if it wasn't there. The desktop is fine, if I don't like it it's VERY easy to delete. Same with quickstart. The system tray is irritating, but there are many other programs that default to a memory-resident program. Not a huge deal when you can right click and disable.
Where real starts to bother me is the registry entry that runs something every time you boot. And if you delete said registry entry, it replaces it the next time you run the program. It pisses me off when programs use my system resources without my knowledge for ANY reason, but I'm pretty sure this one is spyware, which is extra irritating.
On the off chance that there are still people out there who need to hear this, do yourself a favour and use Media Player Classic and Real Alternative (and Quicktime Alternative) in Windows, or Mplayer in Linux.
Perhaps these practices are why REAL has reportedly lost the single biggest contract they ever had which was broadcasting Major League Baseball play by play for $10 per season per listener/viewer.
i nv estor/hellweg/
While no huge amount of money for REAL, it was one of the single largest revenue sources, much of the rest of the revenue stream was from individual purchases of the player.
Supposedly this year its gone to someone else.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/10/technology/tech
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I stopped using it when it became 'viral' and blatently slimy. Then I tried winamp, which I was already using for files I own. Not so good, in my experience, at finding streaming music I want to hear. Apart from Media Player, whats left? I feel like if I want to hear music through the computer, I have be willing to sell my soul.
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
Just for a reference for what I use now:
Some might say that I gave in to the corporate machine; no, I'm simply using the best product for my needs and in WinXP, WMP works very well for most stuff; except for MP3s which I use Winamp 2.x or iTunes. And on Mac, you must give Apple credit for building some good software because iLife '04 rocks. As for linux, I don't use it as a desktop anymore because i can pretty much do it on OSX. Linux: Server yes, Desktop no.Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
God won't SOMEONE mention Apple or Quicktime in this discussion???
-B
I'm sure many readers will find this gem interesting:
About 3 years ago I made mention in a closed streaming media group discussion of Real's flaws in their DRM 'solution'. This was widely published, and I was not the starter of the thread. However, I did drop the line (or something like it) of the solution being 'amateur hour'. Real's at-that-time marketing manager was on the list, and proceeded to track down my particulars and call up management at my company accusing me of 'hacking' their DRM product. I understand he was quite miffed. Ofcourse I posted this back to the list and didn't hear a peep.
The long and short of this story - not only does Real make a shitty spamware/adware/annoyanceware product and try to get developers for free with their 'community source' claptrap, but they also go to interesting lengths to stir up bullshit to protect their interests.
These days I am still at the same company, and architect my own product line. Whenever a customer asks about support for RealMedia, I laugh. Then I tell them this story. And thats the last we hear of the request. Oddly enough, I have never had anyone doubt me - gee I wonder why!
A tip for Real - listen to your customers. And if you have bugs and/or shitty software, fix them.
I think they think they never meant to buy the product, but missed the moving link to the free download. It's there, but you have to know it's there to notice it. The real player download page promenently display's the premium product and has a text link to the free download. It is not quite white text on a white background, but I would not put it past them.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Wow, vintage Penny-Arcade :-)
I had a friend whose company contracted for some proprietary software (this was in the BBS days, Stallman's free software was still only a myth, if that even). This thing installed data in unused portions of the boot sector. Even formatting and repartitioning the hard disk would not remove its data, which was primitive copy-protection/license data.
So maybe the only way to uninstall this software was to burn the hard drive... who knows...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I'm a big fan of it as well, and hope they don't simply because I think it'd be harder to update windows media player at my terminal at work than it was to sneak realplayer onto the machine. But I think the best solution might just be for them to point to real's helix player instead of realplayer. While I admit I havn't tried it on windows yet, I'm really impressed with the latest stable build of the helix player in linux. The signup to download it was a little annoying, but once that was done the player itself seems great. Even less bloated than the normal linux realplayer, and it dosn't try to do much more than just play media files.
Posted anonymously to prevent me getting yelled at when I go back to work.
RealOne Player for Mac OS X is a sweet app. No prefs hijacking, looks good, works even better. I like it more than Apple's Quicktime Player. Perhaps there is just something about Mac OS X that commands respect from developers - Windows version of this same app sounds like a real POS.
I hadn't tried real's helix player for months, and decided to give it a try a couple days back when I found a link mplayer didn't seem to like. If anyone's looking for an official player from real that actually seems well designed, they might want to give it a chance. The Linux client at least seemed really nice. Clean gtk2 based gui, uncluttered interface, and it dosn't seem to want to do much aside from playing audio and video. The only downside is that it's nearly as much of a pain to find on the helix site as the free version of realplayer is on real's site. Otherwise I think pointing to it might be a viable option for companies providing real streams.
Everything will be taken away from you.
everytime you boot!? Last time I checked(using regmon) Just the real player system tray program accesses the registry dozens of times every second.
That's when real player is NOT running!!!
Stallman's software wasn't a 'myth' back in the BBS days. I have a printed GNU Emacs manual written by Stallman that was publised in 1986. The difference is, back in 'those days' the UNIX people lived apart from us 'mere home computer' folks from their expensive UNIX workstations. Stallman's culture just comes at the modern computing world from a different starting point than the BBS'n folks. It was around then.
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This thing installed data in unused portions of the boot sector. Even formatting and repartitioning the hard disk would not remove its data, which was primitive copy-protection/license data.
:)
Isn't that what Intuit did not too long ago?
Yes, it's tax time, and I'm on my yearly anti-Quicktax crusade
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
> So maybe the only way to uninstall this software was to burn the hard drive... who knows...
This is really done in some company where they think data security and theft really matters. Burning old scratched tapes or crushing broken HD to pieces was mandatory in a firm worked in.
But voodoo & exorcism is furthermore needed when trying to uninstall some software...
noone's gonna stream higher than 500k anyway. If you have a decent connection this will stop the buffering
the extra $70 they will try to tack on when you buy the RealPlayer 10 Plus, think of it as a step in the right direction... it's on sale from $130. and as we all know, if it's on sale and it's recommended that you have it, you really should buy it... (or check your bank account regularly to make sure you didn't)
Check out the blog posts, especialy the third one. Apperanly real paid $2.5 million to a design company for design advice, and also hired an advertizing firm. The design company told them that they needed to make the software more use friendly, etc. The Advertizing company discovered that Real had universal name recgonition online (along with microsoft, google) but at the same universal distain.
Both were canned, and none of their suggestions were taken.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Did fdisk /mbr work?
I do not know... this was a while ago, and my friend is, sadly, dead. Turns out he had diabetes but never saw an MD about the symptoms until it was too late, collapsed on the emergency room floor. They found this out during the autopsy. Anyway, back on subject, I do not know. He did say that uninstalling it the "proper way" worked, it undid the changes to the boot sector. But it also made changes to the original 720k floppy (yep, back in the day) so it would not install on a different computer until uninstalled from the first one. It would remove the data from the boot sector and change a flag on the original floppy. The developers put a lot of effort into the copy protection system, my friend was unable to crack it and he was really good as far as hackers back then went. But he did not put all of his time and effort into it, after all, his company bought enough licenses for their (token ring) network ;-)
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
This is really done in some company where they think data security and theft really matters. Burning old scratched tapes or crushing broken HD to pieces was mandatory in a firm worked in.
I used to work in a classified facility. We had hard drive shredders. Yep, you heard me right -- insert a hard drive in the top, metal powder came out the bottom. Even then we could not throw it away, it had to be degaussed first. "Paranoid" does not begin to describe it. We also had a tape shredder, same deal, but with plastic powder instead of metal powder :-)
In both cases, we had to drive bags of said powder, a team effort (just in case al Qaeda hijacked the truck and tried to glue the hard drive atoms back together, they would have two throats to slit instead of one), to a special government incinerator that got super hot (about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and the burning had to be witnessed by about five people with special gas masks to protect against the fumes.
We had sledge hammers located strategically throughout the building. In case of terrorist or Russian attack, we were supposed to smash our computers to bits on the way to the bomb shelter since we did not have time for proper disposal.
And just think, all of these security measures are ruined if a single numbnuts downloads spyware...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Eep. Stop right there, you're standing on a landmine. INI files on a modern system should be put in the per-user "Application Data" folder. You can retrieve its path using SHGetSpecialFolderPath (95/IE 4.0 or 98+) or SHGetFolderPath (98/IE 5.0 or 98SE+) using the CSIDL_APPDATA constant. If you've fail to do this, your app is currently giving ulcers to some innocent admin of WinNT-family boxes who now has to manually add extra NTFS permissions for the Everyone group to your app's install folder. Your app also doesn't work correctly with multiple users (all users share the same settings), under roaming profiles (settings are per-machine, not per-user), or running off a network drive (Ha! Like *your* app deserves chmod a+w on the Samba server!). As an added bonus, your app may stop working under XP SP2 (or after some Critical Update in the unspecified future) and almost certainly will be b0rked by the time Longhorn comes out (if MS isn't a completely lost cause, they'll have stopped making users Admin by default by that timeframe).
You make excellent points, and I do agree with you. However, the apps I write (game editing utilities) are not used on "real" networks, and 90% of the time, not used except on my own computer.
This is halfway on topic, talking about crappy software. I hate it when software is not multi-user aware: it installs itself in my user's start menu, instead of for all users. It stores data in a way that does not work on a per-user basis. Stuff I write for myself works one way, but before I release software I will make sure it works the correct way. Right now I am working on one major program and I have not even started on the Windows GUI yet (backend cross-platform stuff is working, Linux GUI is almost there, but the Win32 GUI is basically a gray window and a menu), but when I do, trust me, it will work in a multi-user possibly roaming atmosphere. And in the case were configuration settings are not present, it will still work. Try deleting MS Word's registry settings and see what happens... my applications will not follow that example ;-)
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
RealOne on Mac OS X is actually a pretty decent, light-weight player. It plays Real Media streams and only Real Media streams, to my knowledge. That's all I need it for. And once I found the Free Download link, everything was pretty simple after that. Register with a bogus E-mail address, create some dumb-ass password and forget about it. And if I want to remove it, drag it to the trash.
I find that a lot of software for OS X is like this, whereas the Windows versions almost always require some sort of surgical procedure to remove. Do the Windows programming departments of companies nowadays have more programmers just to put in the extra, spyware garbage? Because that kind of stuff certainly isn't in any prominent OS X applications that I can think of.
Not to mention that some of your most trusted colleagues were not who they appeared. That God-fearing guy from Texas, part of a 4th generation of a rancher family, who drank nothing but Whiskey and spoke with such a charming Southern slang was pobably born in Vladivostok.
Virtually everything goes in ~/Library/Preferences now; a few system-wide prefs go in /Library/Preferences. Same goes for interface software like Preference Panes, menu applets, etc - you generally have the option of installing it in ~/Library or in /Library (with an admin password) so everyone on the machine can use it. Nothing ever gets written in /System except for, well, the operating system.
/Library/Application Support or ~/Library/Application Support. Fewer and fewer, though, since the .app bundle generally takes care of that need.
.plist files, which are all XML. Pretty slick on the whole.
/usr/local/etc/rc.d FreeBSD scheme. Room for smart customisation but reasonably easy to keep track of.
Some dumbass apps write prefs stuff in ~/Documents when they really shouldn't (curiously, most of them are from Microsoft - Halo, Office, Virtual PC - although the latter already did that when it was Connectix). Most apps are single-folder (.app bundle) but some do keep static data and executables in
The thing I really like is that most app prefs can be read or changed from the command line with the "defaults" command, which uses a hierarchical scheme for locating particular preferences ("defaults read com.apple.Safari"). Or you can hand-edit the
I also like the system-wide startup scheme; sort of halfway between the hairy System V soooo many files extreme and the
Funky Unix touch I noticed the other day - you can use standard bash/tcsh style emacs text editing commands in the Safari address bar, or in other text edit areas throughout the system. control-a, control-e, control-t, etc. Nice.
I was an OS 9 / Linux dual boot holdout. Now I shy away from anything that requires Classic, and though I have a Linux partition, I just never have the need to use it (wot, reboot?!). Drank the koolaid, I guess.
The reason they are in trouble is because of their poor vision of the future.
We (company of 40,000) looked at their multicasting technology and news delivery in 1997. We liked what we saw and wanted to license or buy it for the entire company. They said "NO" - Real still wanted access to our desktops in the form of ads. I guess they thought there was a lot of money in that.
Think logically, why would any CIO sign off on a product to keep his employees busy watching ads instead of doing real work?
They did crawl back (at least a year later) and try to sell just the engine piece but no one was interested. There was better stuff available out there and cheaper by the time they realized their mistake.
Sir, I object to your characterisation of the /etc directory. It is there for a reason. What you describe is fine and dandy for games and assorted disposable desktop crapola but not so fine for most (serious) applications. Having a centralized (but easilly maintained and repaired) repository of configuration data, makes it easy to backup this critical part of the system and also allows for better control of access to it.
Making remarks in the vain of "Let every application be a king of its own hill" smacks of the same lack of understanding of reasons behind these design decisions as an equally common cry of "Lets get rid of package managment and let every application have installer ala windows". So noone will ever be able to tell again what installed where and what version is it. Not to mention the fact that your system will be 20 times its current size since each new application will be either statically linked or have its own libraries in its own corner of the filesystem.
Both /etc and the package managment are results of many smart people coming up with a way to solve problems that existed due to exactly this brand of chaos you are proposing. Because having application = directory relationship is what came before the /etc and (much later) package managment.
Let me begin by saying that I don't run windows so I'm not all upset about the windows realOne player shenanigans.
I run Linux. The realplayer on linux runs fine, it plays live real audio and video streams for me. (mplayer does everything else)
Windows users may want to go try one of the new players. (there's one written in python you know... it is very simple, no bloat.)
that's up to you though, it doesn't affect me much.
Real network's server software is pretty good though. Better than windows media server.
- It runs on linux.
- It has an excellent system for live stream redundancy. Every step of the way from the camera to the player you can have multiple redundant systems so that no matter what; your live event does not die. I cannot over-state the importance of this when you are running a live event for a paying customer!
- It is extremely modular. Especially now with the mostly open source helix software you can write/modify most capabilities.
I am admin for several Real and windows media servers.
Windows servers are an all around pain in the ass. Maybe that biases me towards Real.
The windows media server is a black box, when it does something odd like suddenly stop logging or something all I can do is apply the standard MS remedy: restart the service.
With the helix servers running on linux I can see what's going on. maybe I've just been spoiled by using OSS all the time.
Oh, and have you ever encountered a bug is MS software, emailed a developer and had the problem resolved?
helixcommunity.org actually has developers you can talk to.
I know you'd probably have to kill me first...
What kind of data could you possibly have on those disks. Wen Ho Lee (spy or not) managed to sneak out quite a bit of data between his ears. Heck, they practically leave the back door open at a DOE facility!
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
bah, too kind.
It's more fun to use postmaster@real.com
sends all their spam right back to them.
See my .sig for a product I work on called Thinstall - You can pacakge all of your files and registry keys into a single EXE which runs without extracting anything and without modifying the system registry. It simulates a virtual filesystem and registry for your application, so the files appear to be on the hard drive already.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Don't forget that Real only has the one method to make money - so it's not surprising if they tried to make it do a lot. Microsoft already has billions, and owns the desktop, so it's much easier for them to make their software simpler, without adverts, etc.
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As of today, Penny Arcade had a newspost from Tycho that takes a paragraph at the bottom to disparage Real and plug RealAlternative like so many Slashdotters have already done here.
On a pretty much unrelated topic, I thought it might also be interesting to point out that none of the major media players, as far as I can tell, suffer from the buffering which has been the butt of so many (!) jokes in this topic already. All of them have some feature (under different names, of course) that allows them to build up their playback buffers as fast as the Internet connection will allow, which basically gives you minutes of buffer after only a short period of time. Borders on progressive download, I guess. That and RealPlayer 10 has a feature that allows you to cache a user-specified amount of the past stream, even for live streams.
Perhaps I'm too quick to consider forgiving Real for their privacy issues, but as far as playback quality goes (both in terms of streaming and codecs), bashing Real for being bad at that would be just plain misinformed.