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NPR's Car Talk Switches Back To RealAudio
taped2thedesk writes "Today, NPR's Car Talk, a 'call in talk [radio] show about car mechanics', announced they were switching back to RealAudio, after dumping it for Windows Media a few months ago. When the show switched to Windows Media, Real took notice and convinced the show to switch back, by addressing various listener complaints about their player (many of which were fixed in RealPlayer 10). The hosts say: 'We believe [Real have] made a serious and successful attempt to address those things that our listeners complained about most... They even offered to serve the audio for free online, which defrays an expense we'd otherwise have to cover.'"
Another interesting tidbit I came across was that they also have an alternative for the number one buggy movie player, Quicktime (which I likewise refuse to install). Now I can view both formats with none of the buggyness, and also have only one media player to worry about. Less is more.
If you need a test station may I suggest O'Franken Factor
Help fight continental drift.
The current week's show is available here.
I know the site used to have archived "favorites" of many, many shows when it was hosted by cars.com. However, I don't see the favorite clips listed anymore...
This made me wonder if they even considered going to Ogg Vorbis streaming with Icecast. Whether they considered it or not, it made me wonder how many Icecast streams are available.
I found a list here:
http://www.icecast.org/streamlist.php
Not as many as I had hoped to find.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
https://player.helixcommunity.org/
Downloads are available here:
MS2.1 had problems playing back non-realaudio/realvideo datatypes -- if you need these, M2 is a better bet.
Nightly builds are also available -- see the player webpage for details.
Check out Helix Player
And, FWIW, I ran AdAware on my machine right after installing the latest Realplayer. No spyware installed either as far as I can tell.
This is probably a little offtopic, but what the heck.
Interestingly enough, Rob Glaser, founder of RealNetworks, has 'crossed streams' with Microsoft. In fact, he was a top executive there before moving on to found RealNetworks.
So it's little wonder that the battle between Microsoft and RealNetworks is so fierce at times - there are no enemies like old friends.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
An old radio, a sound card, and a few shell scripts -- that's all it takes.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
For Media Player's replacement, use Media Player Classic.
This is an excellent site for problems like realplayer
If the hcclnet.nl servers are being slashdotted at the moment, you might try some of the other sources for Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative such as:
Free-Codecs.com
and
CodecsDownload.com
These two domains are mirros of each other, and also good source of many video codecs and even some free/OSS media players.
Go here and click on the "Free RealPlayer" link on the right. Should start your download automatically.
So I was like EVERYBODY else. I hated Realone...I hated the ads...I hated the fact that it felt like they were trying to "sneak spyware" onto my computer.
So I tried Real 10. So far...no crashes, and if you disable the browser feature it's JUST AS FAST AS REAL 8...and for any of you that ACTUALLY have an open mind and want to try it, here is information from the Helix community forums on how to optimize Real 10.
>
>
> I work for RealNetworks, and I am the first to admit RealPlayer is not my favorite media player. For video, Media Player Classic (MPC) is, and yes, I use MPC to play my RV9-EHQ aka RV10 content.
>
> Previous RealPlayers have been pretty impolite to put it mildly, and along with so many other computer users, I have been ticked off by its behaviour in many ways. It has been possible to make it well mannered, but it has included being forced to delete certain files to prevent that annoying Message Center. However, it has not been spyware in a long time, even though one old player did send back some usage information. That's long gone, but it's hard to be forgiven for that mistake.
>
> Considering how past players have created such a bad reputation, this post is probably futile, but anyway... Thanks to those few positive posts though, especially for the Linux and OS X players. It is nice to see someone taking the time to give it a another chance.
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> This RealPlayer 10 is better than before, it is fast, small, and does not run +10MB services in the background, like one well known example, name withheld. However, this post is not really about performance, even though a lot could be said about improvements in this area. More importantly in this discussion, it is also better in terms of its behaviour, albeit less better than me, many of my co-workers, and all of you, had hoped for.
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> Here's what you need to do when installing:
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> * Choose Custom Install
> * Uncheck all the boxes you don't like for stuff on the desktop and quicklaunch bar. There is nothing hidden by a scroll bar, at least not with my computer screen size.
> * Check only the media types you want it to play. This is the only time you will be asked this, it will never try to take back any media types. Now, is this really so bad compared to other software, in regards to media types? It's not as polite as MPC, but I have other media players which take over media types, and there is not even an option to customize this..
> * Start RealPlayer, you may have to create an account. Everybody hates this, and wish it would go way. Agreed, but RealNetworks has to make money somehow, and the number of users is a needed measure to document. So use fake information if you like.
> * Then go to Tools->Preferences->Automatic Services, Click Configure Message Center, then uncheck "Check for new messages". Click OK on the "warning" that comes up. Now you will never be bothered by the Message Center. In previous versions, you could not disable the Message Center completely, without deleting certain files. Minor improvement, it's still opt-out, but at least it's possible. Check or uncheck Auto-update in its sub-menu as well.
> * Go to Tools->Preferences->General and set On startup display to "Player only". That way, no browser, and it starts much quicker.
>
> So to summarize, a few clicks are needed to opt-out, you have to "sign in" the first time. Yes, somewhat annoying, but that's about it. It could have been better, but compared to many other examples, it's not that terrible. Since it has been so very bad in the past though, it clearly should have changed more to make a shining example, but since it is RealNetworks' main vehicle for generating revenue, there is a lot of nervousness about changing things too quickly.
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> Download the free RealPlayer 10 Beta here, with no re-direction or sales tricks:
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> http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=slashdot [real.com]
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> A
Two great articles on the sordid history of RealPlayer and their lows can be found here: Real Obnoxious and Real Proof.
Included are some testimonials from (allegedly) actual Real co. employees.
And, FWIW, I ran AdAware on my machine right after installing the latest Realplayer. No spyware installed either as far as I can tell.
You do realize that the AdAware engine is not psychic, right? Nor does it use a heuristic to identify mal-ware.
AdAware -- much like a virus checker --, identifies Trojans and ad-ware by "signature", some array of bytes unique to the annoyance in question. Until somebody examines a program, decides it is mal-ware, extracts that program';s signature and adds it to AdAware's signature database, Ad-ware doesn't "know" about it.
For all we know, Realplayer installs -- or is itself -- mal-ware, but no one from Ad-ware has gotten around to labelling it as such. After all, RealPlayer Ten is rather new.
And people can legitimately disagree about what is ad-ware: surely RealPlayer has claimed that all its versions of Realplayer did nothing illegitimate, as RealPlayer maintained that it wasn't popping up ads, but "informative messages", and that phoning home uniquely identifying information about its users was a positive benefit for those users.
Don't misunderstand me: AdAWare is a useful product, but it's no panacea and it -- like a virus scanner -- will unavoidably always be a bit out of date. In the case of RealPlayer, I'd trust RealPlayer's track-record of untrustworthiness.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?