Real Begs Apple for Alliance

hype7 writes "In a an extremely forward move, CEO of Real Networks Rob Glaser has emailed Steve Jobs, imploring him to open up Apple's AAC Digital Rights Management System - FairPlay - to Real. The upside for Real - all music sold by them would be compatible with the iPod. The upside for Apple - Real would make the iPod its primary device for the RealNetworks store and for the RealPlayer software. However, Mr. Glaser wasn't just dangling carrots - he implied that should Apple not be a receptive partner for an alliance, he would be forced to look towards Microsoft. There was a similar post made not too long ago, with BusinessWeek's take on the whole thing." There's a Reuters story as well.

Comments

High Level of Fear?

[soapbox]

From the Article:

"Real understands how incredibly powerful the Microsoft music initiative will be," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry consultant and president of Envisioneering. "I don't think that Jobs understands this. He doesn't realize how big the juggernaut is about to get."

In his e-mail message to Mr. Jobs, Mr. Glaser said that he was reaching out to Mr. Jobs before making a move to switch camps. Mr. Glaser said he was surprised that the proposal had been leaked.

"Why is Steve afraid of opening up the iPod?" he asked in a telephone interview. "Steve is showing a high level of fear that I don't understand."

Oh yeah, I'm sure Steve is quaking in his boots--he's known for being a coward in the face of juggernauts like Disney, Microsoft, and The Beatles' Music Company (Apple Corps)...

Anyway, Apple is hedging its bets in a few places. You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes (a tutorial in this month's MacAddict tells how to use the codec), and Apple even includes an OGG icon to use in OS X, though you have to do one or two (easy) things to make it work seamlessly. I don't think Apple is afraid of opening things up except that, for instance, supporting WMA or Real playback on iPods would endanger the iTunes Music Store sales, which provide zero or very little profit to Apple, IIRC, but which sure improve the sales of iPods. Where Real fits into the risk/reward equation is unclear, but why let Real just have a piece of the action? Doesn't look like the profit to Apple is that great.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has that codec even been updated in a year? I've been using it on my iBook for quite a while, and while it plays vorbis files fine, it takes like 10 seconds for each song to start (during which iTunes goes into a coma).

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Seth Finklestein]

When I switched to Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" last year, one of the key reasons was the complete lack of adware and spyware on the Mac OS platform. My computer is my own, and is not for sale to the highest bidder. That's why I don't use RealPlayer. It's my choice.

Frankly, RealPlayer should not pressure Apple to do anything. Real represent all that is evil with software: they took a mediocre player (RealPlayer G2) and made it into a horrible mess of marketroid-fueled insanity. You can't even "quit" RealPlayer without being assaulted with pop-up ads begging you to buy the so-called "Gold" version.

Apple respects the consumer. That's why I pray they will never, ever, bow to this so-called "pressure" from Real.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes

That's not "easily", and ogg support is crippled.

It's not hedging either -- AAC/MP4 is far more popular than ogg. Outside of a few vocal slashdot posters, nobody cares about ogg.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Audio is a dying format and Glasser knows this. This is a last ditch effort to try and make something before they begin to fold. Why would Microsoft suddenly work with them after Real just fucked them over in Europe?

What a crack addict.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. Every time Microsoft has gotten itself raked over in a court of law, Rob Glaser and crew have been the guys holding the pitchfork. Real can "look towards Microsoft" all they want, but MS has absolutely no reason to work with them, and every reason to tell them to go purify themselves in Lake Minnetonka.

Funny thing, karma. Suck it down, Real!

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Custard]

A little off-topic, but is it possible to play FLAC encoded files in iTunes? I'm considering doing a Final Rip And Encoding (tm) of my CD collection, and FLAC seems the way to go

Flac doesn't provide a smaller enough file size to be worth it for an entire collection, imho... You get about 50% compression with flac (lossless, 10 minutes = 50 mb) but mp3 can give near 90% (lossy, 10 minutes = 10 mb) with great quality.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[foidulus]

iTunes Music Store sales, which provide zero or very little profit to Apple, IIRC, but which sure improve the sales of iPods.
This is actually quite a common myth, they actually make about 30 cents a song, the comment about them breaking even was about(at that point) the fact that the amount of songs they have sold have basically covered development, server, and ad costs. Almost all of that is fixed costs, so they will have economy of scale. The store can become very profitable if it is able to sell a lot of songs.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[BrerBear]

Real Audio is a dying format and Glasser knows this. This is a last ditch effort to try and make something before they begin to fold. Why would Microsoft suddenly work with them after Real just fucked them over in Europe?

Probably for the same reasons Microsoft would want to work with Sun after Sun dogged them for years. Microsoft would look at the deal objectively, and not emotionally, the way you did.

There are still plenty of sites out there that use or require the RealAudio format, and it's not dying anytime soon. Getting Real to switch to WMA would give Microsoft a slam dunk monopoly in streaming media. Why wouldn't Microsoft want that?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[pohl]

You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes (a tutorial in this month's MacAddict tells how to use the codec)

Does this tutorial happen to explain how to make iTunes properly export ogg music to other machines that are also configured to use the ogg codec plugin? I've had ogg support configured for a long time, but was frustrated to learn that my ogg collection at my G4 in my basement cannot be shared with the iMac in my kitchen.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[brutus_007]

"You can't even 'quit' RealPlayer without being assaulted with pop-up ads begging you to buy the so-called 'Gold' version."

Unlike Apple's Quicktime, which assaults you to buy the full version every time it starts up. No "Do not show me this again" or "Never" option and no way to navigate to the only possible option - "Later"

Re:High Level of Fear?

[n9uxu8]

As opposed to Quicktime screaming BUY ME everytime you are forced to open that program? There is no doubt that Real screwed up with their marketing campaign, but the request to upgrade to gold is no worse than QT. Dave

Re:High Level of Fear?

[burns210]

You are right, Real's music store would compete with iTMS, if Apple allied with Real. What you forget is that that isn't a problem. iTMS exists for the sole purpose of selling iPods, which it has done extremely well at, but the store itself about breaks even. Who cares if Real takes a small chunk in the overal music sale? It will only help to sell more ipods.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[phong3d]

IIRC - you only get the plea for Quicktime Pro once per day/24 hours - once you say "Later", it stays gone until the next day. No less annoying, though.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[VertigoAce]

The reason to do an entire collection in a lossless format is so that you can later encode it in any format that comes along. On your desktop system it's convenient to be able to play the lossless format, but you probably want lossy encoding for portable devices. Sure you could encode it all in mp3 now, but what if something better comes along in the future? If something happens to your original CD you're stuck doing a conversion from one lossy format to another, which is less than ideal. If you had archived it in a lossless format, it doesn't matter if you keep the CD around, you can always get the best results from a new format.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Dot.Com.CEO]

You mean Real has been dragging Microsoft through courts therefore Microsoft would never make a deal with them? Just like they didn't with Sun, then?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Seth Finklestein]

That's why I just keep QuickTime running in the backgound. There's no convoluted "Taskbar" or "Tray icon" to get in the way. Furthermore, because QuickTime is a component of Mac OS X, the player takes up only 200 kiB of RAM!

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Andy_R]

Because someone out there will probably find this useful, here's how to banish the Quicktime nag screen (known to work in OS9, not tested by me in OSX):

Set your Mac clock a year or so into the future, reboot, play a quicktime file, (going past the nag screen), set clock back, reboot.

The nag screen will go away until 1 day after the date you chose.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

made it into a horrible mess of marketroid-fueled insanity

There goes my horrible mess of marketroid-fueled insanity case mod.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mydigitalself]

the RealPlayer with ad- and spyware that your are referring to, is it the free version of the commercial version?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

QuickTime doesn't prompt you everytime you start it. It prompts you periodically. And even if it did prompt everytime there is an easy way around it -- never quit QuickTime. Or is your Windows computer not stable enough to pull that off?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

they actually make about 30 cents a song

...but

songs they have sold have basically covered development, server, and ad costs

Hmmm, sounds like very little profit to me.
Maybe you are the one who is confused?

It currently provides zero or very little profit to Apple and most likely never will directly.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're right, that Apple isn't very afraid of supporting WMA or Real playbacks on iPod, but it doesn't sound like that's even what's being suggested. It sounds like Real just wants to offer iTunes-type AAC's in their own store, which, as you pointed out, only endangers iTMS, which isn't much of a money-maker for Apple.

However, I don't think they'll go for it, and here's why:
1) Apple doesn't tend to like to create endless options. It's something that appeals to the /. crowd, but Apple's whole business model tends to be limiting the options (supported options, anyway) of the devices they sell with the benefit of quality and simplicity. If they start explicitly partnering with Real, and Real's service sucks, then you've given users an extra (but sucky) option, increased the possibility that users will get frustrated and associate their frustration with your product, and all so you could have an extra music-sale service that is probably just a poor rip-off of iTMS. What's the benefit to Apple/iPod users? What's the benefit to Apple.

2) Much of Apple's handling of the whole digital music/iTMS issues seem to be aimed at appeasing record labels. If labels become unhappy and pull their music, iTMS falls apart. Therefore, they probably want to limit any moves that would increase the possibility of unauthorized listening and sharing and such, and moves to open up their DRM to other companies is probably a touchy subject with the labels.

3) The DRM is licensed from someone else, right? Are they even allowed to share the tech with others? I don't know this one.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

and ogg support is crippled.

How so? iTunes simply uses QuickTime. Once you have an Ogg Vorbis plugin for QuickTime, they'll play in iTunes and anything else that uses QuickTime. I had this working over a year ago.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care a great deal about .ogg files, I have maybe 40 in total. I just thought it was kind of cool that UT2003 and '4 both use oggs for the music files.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[RickHunter]

Huh?

What he's saying was that the comment about the iTMS making little profit was referring to them having sold enough songs to cover the fixed costs - the initial costs of buying hardware, developing the store software, and running ads. As they're making about 30 cents a song, unit costs included, the store will make a profit - most likely quite a large one.

It hasn't provided a profit so far because all the money made went to paying off the initial investment. Now that that's (close to) done...

Seriously. Take a basic economics class.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

The battles with Sun were just business. Gates respects that. With Real, it was personal. Glaser is an ex-Microsoftie who left the company to start Real after earning a boatload of money and a bucketfull of bad blood.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Paulrothrock]

The iTMS has produced a small profit this quarter, according to this.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[ThreeDayMonk]

I just downloaded a "crackz" registration code off the internet. I don't have any interest in the "Pro" features - I just wanted to get rid of that annoying box that assailed me every time I used Quicktime.

Is that illegal? Quite frankly, I don't care. I'm just fixing my operating system, which I paid for. The advertised Quicktime support was broken, and I fixed it.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[chris_mahan]

I use ogg.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[GPLDAN]

Microsoft would look at the deal objectively, and not emotionally, the way you did.

I love snide ad-hominem BS like this. It's the reason slashdot has become a cesspool.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use OS X you insensitive clod!

Re:High Level of Fear?

[ajservo]

You can knock that out easy... Later goes by your calendar date... It just waits a day or two to pester you again. If you roll your calendar forward... THEN press later. Roll your calendar back, and then bang, no more upgrade annoyances. For some reason it won't allow you to do it past 2029, though... I guess that's when it'll all come crashing down....

Re:High Level of Fear?

[shotfeel]

Define "make about 30 cents a song".

IIRC that's Apple's cut of the 99 cents. Out of that 30 cents comes all the cost of running the store -everything from paying salaries to bandwidth costs in addition to the costs you mentioned.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[shotfeel]

If done properly, I agree. I think what Apple is worried about is making sure they don't hand Real a weapon that can be turned on them somewhere down the road.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I have to run the program all the time if I don't use it all the time? My iBook is stable enough to do it, but I don't want to waste the system resources, and I don't want to waste the screen space (I've got a 12" screen) in the Dock either. Apple is just being an asshole for forcing me to view their ads (after I've already paid them $1500!)

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple respects the consumer.

No, Apple does not respect the consumer. Apple is a greedy, arrogant company that deigns to allow common people to get their grubby, unworthy hands all over the nice shiny technology, in exchange for serious money (to help the user understand that this is special kit).

Apple finds consumers (what some companies call "customers") to be annoying, albeit necessary. Steve Jobs tried to do away with the whole consumer thing when he ran NeXT, but that only lasted for about a decade. Apparently, given Apple's continuing market share decline, he is still pursuing this holy grail.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you get rid of the Dock icon? For me, that's the most annoying part of having it run all the time (wastes screen space on a 12" iBook)

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Slime-dogg]

Even if Microsoft looked at such a deal objectively, they wouldn't see enough money to make it worth the effort. The last time I checked, MS does not have a monopoly in the hand-held audio player department, and it's a bit late in the game for them to start.

MS doesn't really have the same things to offer as Apple does. MS does have the desktop monopoly, but there's the problem of Real already having a player for that platform. It's unlikely that people are going to want to load up Real on their palm PC's too, since that whole role falls into the realm of the iPod and Rio.

I hope Real tanks. They have realized that their product sucks, that ad-infested software sucks, and that they don't have the intelligence to really know marketing. They are trying to turn to other companies to bail them out, but I think they'll run up against the fact that no one really gives a crap about their products.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[GTRacer]

[Fry] Ooohh, BU-U-U-R-R-RN!!

Seriously though, I've found RP to be much more annoying and disruptive than QT. I don't know if QT hides itself in Windows better than RP, but there's a lot more crap to clean up from RP. And it keeps grabbing filetypes...

Then again, WMP9 keeps asserting itself as my default .avi player despite my insistence that WMP6 is my choice - DivX broke my WMP9...

GTRacer
- The Real Deal

Re:High Level of Fear?

[kgarcia]

I tried it. It works...

unless you have 500 odd OGG files you are importing

then it's slower than molasses

slow at starting up

slow at importing

slow at displaying the playlist

slow at going from one file to the next ... and it's just with .ogg files. Haven't had that problem with mp3's.

so i went back to what I was using before.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike Apple's Quicktime, which assaults you to buy the full version every time it starts up.
Because of this, I dug up an illicit serial number for Quicktime Pro. I use none of the features, but I wanted the warning to go away.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

QuickTime Player is swapped out when it is idle. It doesn't take up any system resources. The only screen space that is taken up is the icon in the Dock. That's a maximum of 128x128 pixels but generally much, much less than that. And, you can also auto-hide the Dock if you want to.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

I'd imagine the performance hit is due to the QuickTime Component (might need optimizing), not any crippling by Apple. I never had that many Ogg files, so I haven't experienced your problem.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

that link doesn't say anything about iTMS

Re:High Level of Fear?

[TheRaven64]

This is the one thing that irritates me about OS X. All of the other bundled apps are top rate (the calculator even does currency conversion based on exchange rates it gets from a web service), and yet the default media player gives me a nag screen when I launch it and doesn't let me do full screen playback without an AppleScript hack. I don't care about encoding video in QuickTime (I use FCE when I need to edit and encode video), I'd just like the default media player not to act like an advert for another product.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, have you ever heard of logic? That's like saying people should be forced to leave IE open even when they want to use other browsers most of the time ("Well, it'll only be in the taskbar 80x200 pixels, and you can hide that"). BS. Nothing you buy with a computer that's necessary (and I'd say QT is necessary, considering how few people know how to get alternate media players) should be nagware.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[gcaseye6677]

This is a last ditch effort to try and make something before they begin to fold.

Just wait until they get to the phase of their demise that can now be called the 'SCO phase' and start an IP lawsuit / stock scam. I'm sure they own a few vaguely worded patents, so I wouldn't put it past them at all. Who will they sue first?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[jdwest]

Timing is everything. NAB, which bills itself as the "world's largest electronic media show" is kicks off Saturday in Vegas, and this undoubtedly will be a hot-button topic.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[NaugaHunter]

If they could break even with one time costs, salaries, and bandwidth at 30 cents a song, then once the one times are paid off the difference would be profit. Granted, they will likely turn it into promotions or expansions of some sort effectively reinvesting in itself but they are still making money once the one time costs have been ameliorated (or whatever, IANAAccountant)

Re:High Level of Fear?

[kendoka]

Here here! Real is a horrible piece of software...

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Cecil]

You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes

If by easily, you mean downloading a third-party plugin, then sure. But give credit where credit is due. The guy who wrote the plugin deserves the praise. iTunes Ogg Vorbis support is certainly no thanks to Apple, and there are numerous problems with it as it stands, that *are* in fact their fault. Of all the OSes, all the MP3 players, all the music players I've ever used, Apple is by far the most anti-vorbis, and it really is the only thing that continues to bother me about them.

I really don't understand how anyone could say that Apple is hedging their bets towards Vorbis. They seem to be furiously struggling against it, continuing to push forward with their AAC format against all odds, despite the fact that other manufacturers are increasingly giving in, or at least saying that plan to maybe do so. Apple, on the other hand, consistently refuses to have anything to do with it.

I love OS X. I love the iPod. But Apple: I also love Vorbis.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a stupid fuck. Please, just die.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[kgarcia]

Absolutely correct. I've always thought if they incorporated OGG support natively this wouldn't be a problem, but since it runs as a Quicktime Component, everything slows down to a crawl.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[frogsarefriendly]

The last time I checked, MS does not have a monopoly in the hand-held audio player department, and it's a bit late in the game for them to start.

Just like they were too late to make a dent in the console market. Right. Microsoft will go where it wants when it wants. If it feels there is worthwhile profit in portable audio products, it will go there with force.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[attercoppe]

because QuickTime is a component of Mac OS X

You say that as if it were a good thing; no offense, but you sound like an Apple fanatic, the kind of person that would use the same argument against MS:

They have Media Player built in to Windows? Idiots!

You're saying it takes up less RAM because it's built in? Do you mean the RAM it takes in addition to the "built-in" portion that's always running? Is this a good thing? I'm not sure I follow your argument.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, how presumptive. Some of us enjoy having useful features like multimedia playback in our operating systems. Some of us don't like being able to do anything without a Herculean effort, and thus use Linux.

Please don't post again.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[el cisne]

I love snide ad-hominem BS like this. It's the reason slashdot has become a cesspool.

1. "But you say that like its a bad thing !!?? ;-)

2. "...becoming..." ?????

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Custard]

That's a good point... I wasn't thinking of it from an archivist point of view.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Slime-dogg]

Eh. They didn't make much of a dent in the dial-up ISP market, even though they tried to force their way into that. They are also failing in the pocket-pc / palmtop market. They probably aren't doing all that well in their wireless networking push, and I have doubts about even the X-Box.

MS might be big, but they aren't God.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to take some business economics. Most startup R&D costs are not amortized in the first year of business. Sorry, but just because Apple says they turned a profit on the music store does not mean that it is paid for. Also, they have continually stated that it will be a break even business. This is probably because things like bandwidth and credit card charges and other per song charges eat up enough of the $0.30 that even at hundreds of millions of songs they will only see a small profit from which salaries, hardware costs, marketing etc will need to be paid.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anomylous Howard]

You can't even "quit" RealPlayer without being assaulted with pop-up ads begging you to buy the so-called "Gold" version.

Unlike QuickTime which begs you to but the so-called "Pro" version when you start it up.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, if you're in Windows you don't have to reboot after changing the time. It's the most retarded thing I've ever heard (do you have to reboot after a Daylight Savings to Standard time change?), but hey, it's OSX so it must be the correct thing to do.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[hexgrid]

You can't even "quit" RealPlayer without being assaulted with pop-up ads begging you to buy the so-called "Gold" version.

Apple respects the consumer. That's why I pray they will never, ever, bow to this so-called "pressure" from Real.

You must have never started up Quicktime.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[th77]

That trick (setting the clock forward--I choose 20 years out--and then setting it back) works for Mac OS X as well. And I'm fairly confident it works on Windows as well.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Or is your Windows computer not stable enough to pull that off?"

Oh please.

"And even if it did prompt everytime there is an easy way around it -- never quit QuickTime."

A wonderful solution, of course only if it's for a problem that can't really be a real problem because it's an Apple product.

Better solution. Get QuickTime Alternative. They've stripped all the nonsense for you.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

The logical person would either quit using QuickTime or pay for QuickTime Pro if the "nag" screen were so annoying to them. I paid for QuickTime Pro. It's only $30.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's only half the story. Real was obviously trying to sell itself to MS in the early years and instead MS bought out someone else (NetShow).

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

PS - I was just offering up a workaround. I don't see why you should start attacking my logic.

By the way, on Windows, IE is open even when you want to use other browsers most of the time.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

I don't think I'd consider any of the codecs to be more native than others. But, I haven't actually developed any so I may be in the wrong on that.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[haxor.dk]

Jobs "know to be a coward" ?

I disagree. You and I may hate Microsoft, but look at Jobs' actions the last few years. When he took the helm @ Apple, Apple was about to get legally dragged around by Microsoft, and had lost a number of court cases, with no positive change in sight. The legal dukeouts was one of the reasons Apple was dying, albeit slowly.

Jobs came in, cute the crap, and "started the good fight", as he called it. No bruteforcing or running to Daddy Law (DoJ, which has done a POS job IMO), when Microsoft screwed them.

Instead they signed a deal with MS, and guess what ? Apple is bveating Microsoft on their home turf, and recovering teritory at the same time. Innovation! A thing which is APple at heart and a thing which Microsoft has never understood.

And it works. I think Steve's buddhist inspiration from his youth travels has paid off.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mbbac]

A wonderful solution, of course only if it's for a problem that can't really be a real problem because it's an Apple product.

That makes no sense.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Billly Gates]

There is money if they own a defacto monopoly on streaming and it happened to be WMV. They could then charge royalities for every stream on the web, and would kill MacOSX and hurt Linux.

Want to hear the latest on cnn news? Hear the latest album? THen reboot to WindowsXP.

Before you know it its just easier to keep using Windows then to reboot to Linux. See the problem?

How many perl and php developers use Windows rather then a native unix, thanks to MS-OFFICE?

Mac users would also be tempted to switch. Many of them are graphic and video artists. If the only format is WMV then they will be tempted to switch to Windows.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Carthag]

anti-vorbis? that seems a bit harsh, seeing has how Apple has done neither a thing for ogg vorbis nor a thing against it.

furiously struggling against it? heh.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[kendoka]

wait a second, I get trolled for telling the truth? Do you guys have stock in Real, or something? lol

Re:High Level of Fear?

[mhbtr]

I don't know why this is not being mentioned - the Real store DOES use AAC. In fact, it uses 192 AAC (instead of 128) and is can encode in AAC. The issue is PURELY the DRM. They use Helix, Apple uses fairplay. They would like to continue using AAC in their store, but to sell AAC that cannot play on the iPod right now is pure death - what players support Helix AAC? One or two... What players support FairPlay AAC? The only one that counts....

Real wants to keep its SOFTWARE player alive. It is no threat to Apple, and Apple could even require Real to include iTunes with every install of Real. In all honesty, to me it seems like a win win for Apple. And I TOTALLY understand why Real would switch to WMA if Apple turns them down - they have had very little traction getting vendors out there to support Helix DRM in their players, but everyone supports WMA DRM. If Apple will not license FairPlay, who will ever buy Real's songs in AAC? I mean, what will they play them on, other than in RealPlayer, and only on the PC? We know it sucks...
Here is what they need to do (IMHO):

* Agree with Apple to not create a store for the Mac, or only if Apple approves, and if they do, have the files go into iTunes and ONLY be a store (not a player for AAC) on the Mac.
* Agree to include QT with every install of Real on the PC, and have it leave the playback of MOV and other Apple Specific video formats to QT. Who cares about where AAC gets played on the PC? Shouldn't people have an option?
* Abandon Helix, make a convertor app that converts all the current Helix DRMd songs to FairPlay DRM so as they will play on the iPod - NOT try to make the iPod play Helix DRM.
* Enter a Multi-Year exclusive contract to only support the iPod in the Real Player on the PC and to resell it for Apple.

From what I am reading, it sounds like that is what Glaser wants. He really has no option other than choosing WMA instead of the AAC he chose in his store - I mean, you can view it as a threat, but really, who else does AAC? What plays DRMd AAC? He really has no choice....
Just my .02

--
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
- Pericles, 430 BC

Re:High Level of Fear?

[The Analog Kid]

A trick to get rid of that Quicktime Pro version ad assualt is to change the date into a few years ahead, start it, and then go back to the correct date. You'll never see it again for a long long time.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

there's something wrong with your configuration. i clicked "later" once and never had to deal with it again.

are you on a 2K/XP with filesystem permissions set in such a way that the settings cannot be written to disk?

Re:High Level of Fear?

[plj]

If something happens to your original CD you're stuck doing a conversion from one lossy format to another, which is less than ideal.

Except that as an ordinary home user (oh yeah, I'm a geek, but still...) I find the risk of my (pressed) CD collection to get destroyed to be rather small - much, much smaller than my computer's hard disk to malfunction. The highest risk for my CD's would probably be a fire in my apartment, and would that happen, I would have much more important things to worry about than a lost music collection (most of it would anyway be covered by my home insurance, although not all titles would be easy to rebought).

And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that - that data is simply not important enough that I would care that much.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[naden]

Seriously. Take a basic economics class.

Seriously. Grow up.

There are a few ongoing costs that will take some chunk out of that so called 'profit'. My definition of profit is money made after you pay off both the initial investment and paid your ongoing expenditure.

For example:

- Salaries for both iTMS support staff, people organising the 30 second preview (remember its not just the first 30 seconds), as well as the developers, system admins, managers.

- The ongoing bandwidth costs, which would seem to be quite significant given they are serving quite large files.

- Ongoing server requirements. WebObjects on which iTMS is based is notorious for liking to eat up memory to cache database info. And WO having a "the process is the instance" mentality, this would require even greater server requirements as the number of downloads increase.

So there would be appear to be quite a few ongoing costs in there - remember this aint no toy setup that anyone can just whip together. Think Amazon.com style costs.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[zero_offset]

And, no I'm not going to backup those gigabytes and gigabytes of losslessly compressed music (assuming about 50% compression ratio), as there is no convient and inexpensive way for home user to do that

A DVD burner is great for that. We've ripped about 30GB from our CDs, so I can burn those on about six DVDs (three bucks total -- we needed the burner itself for my wife's business anyway) and I avoid having to rip everything over again in the event of a HDD crash on the music server.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That makes no sense."

And that was the point. It usually doesn't.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[CyberdogOSX]

and you know for a fact that these will not be offset by sales? i didn't see any figures, moron.

plus that was not the point you were originally making and you know it. you said that they had barely covered their costs and are unlikely to make any profit.

on what are you basing that? you gave no facts to back up your unfounded notion.

then you come back with cost of doing business stuff when your first claim was blown out of the water(using facts, you should look into some of those).

well, CODB stuff tends to remain flat for considerable peiods of time rising at predictable rates over long periods of time, while profit can rise at an exponential rate over short periods of time making profit possible.
as long as Apple watches it's cost and keep interest high, profit seems inevitable here.

really, Econmics 101. take it.

Re:High Level of Fear?

[MikeTRose]

If you think QuickTime Basic is broken, just wait until you see Preview (which doesn't support all the PDF features that Acrobat does) or Mail.app (which isn't a full-featured Exchange client). Just because you paid for the OS doesn't mean that everything in it does everything you want for $0.00 forever and ever. If you don't want the QT Pro features and just want not to be nagged, use the date workaround and quit whining. Are you a nincompoop? Quite frankly, I don't care. :-)

Good!

[Steamhead]

I say good! No matter how much we thing real sucks here, this can only be good, a good easy DRM (hopefully) and another thing that will work with iPods. How can this be bad?

Re:Good!

[gid13]

Well... It seems to me that if it contributes to the spread of Real's official player it's a bad thing. Real's formats don't seem to me to have any technical advantage, so spreading them is a bad thing in my eyes, especially since I'm not really a fan of the idea of DRM at all.

Re:Good!

[jefe7777]

I'm not sure.

(geek tries to impress prospective female)

geek: "Look at my cool iPod mini, it's wonderful." (hands the device to female)

female: "wow. it's pretty cute. kind of like you. let me play a song. (pushes button). hmmm. nothing is happening...what does 'buffering' mean?"

(girl walks off not impressed)

Re:Good!

[kinzillah]

you have it all wrong. Its more like:

(geek tries to impress prospective female)

geek: "Look at..."

(girl walks off)

Re:Good!

[macgyvr64]

And one more company with DRM that's already cracked :-P

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know.

In my experience, the (girl walks off) happens *after* the (hands the device to female), not before.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

holy shit that's funny.

Re:Good!

[Llywelyn]

>(geek tries to impress prospective female)

I think you overestimate the social skills of /. geeks...

(geek tries to impress prospective female)

Geek: Erm....
Geek: Uh...

(girl walks off)

Re:Good!

[pjt33]

Geek tries to impress prospective female? Is this because the geek knows that trying to impress an actual female won't work?

Re:Good!

[Blue Stone]

"(geek tries to impress prospective female)"

Prospective adj. Likely to become or be: prospective clients.

Translation: (Geek tries to impress pre-op male-to-female transsexual).

Real Audio will be the least of his worries.

Re:Good!

[shotfeel]

I was thinking maybe Apple should go ahead with this with the added condition that Real write (or allow Apple to write) a free plugin for Quicktime that plays Real media.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

if by "device" you mean "diamond ring," yes.

Re:Good!

[kendoka]

Man, you can't impress a girl with a 'mini' - everyone knows "bigger is better" with the ladies!

Re:Good!

[michaelhood]

LOL. I think you need to check out my sig.. ;)

Re:Good!

[BK425]

Not to undermine my engineering/geekiness here but... while she may be "prospective" (in terms of becoming GF.x or such) but most likely is not a "prospective female". Possibly depending on where you hang out.

Re:Good!

[Daleks]

(geek tries to impress prospective female)

Is this how Lisp plays out in real life?

Maybe it's just me...

[gid13]

...but as a consumer I'd probably view an alliance with Real as a negative.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Altima(BoB)]

Exactly. Even though Apple may be accused of high prices, when it comes to software and things like iTunes and its music store, Apple seem to have pleasing consumers as a top priority, the whole Fairplay system is only as cool as it is because Apple wrestled with the Music Indistry on our behalf. Okay I know they are far from altruistic, they are there to make a profit, but they do this by not pissing customers off.

Cut to Real. Ouch, just finiding their free player on their site is a pain in the ass, not to mention all the spyware, the bloated nature of their products... their number one seems to be their advertisers, then their bottom line, then the consumer. My opinion of Apple would go down if they associated themselves with these fools.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[uv_light]

their number one seems to be their advertisers, then their bottom line, then the consumer.

I always thought that real player is so successful that too many people is using it, so they wanna piss some of the costomer off. lol, and they have successfully pissed me off, I havent been using real player for a few years.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Anonymous Coward]

when it comes to software and things like iTunes and its music store, Apple seem to have pleasing consumers as a top priority

Ahh. I see we have an Apple user who's never used Apple products on Windows. I'd take Real any day over Apple, and that says a lot.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[geekbruin]

agreed. there's more than one reason to dislike a relationship with mac and real. as far as i'm concerned, real is no better than a spammer that installs spyware on your computer.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[mbbac]

Yeah, but Real working with FairPlay AAC and the iPod doesn't hurt Apple or iTunes Music Store in anyway. iPod owners could stick with a complete Apple solution if they wanted, or they could also get some content from Real.

iTMS is mainly used as a driver for iPod sales, Real could also be a driver for iPod sales and Apple wouldn't have to exert any effort for the extra bit of push and in fact may be able to get some extra revenue from Real.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you actually trying to say something here?

Good to see

[FortKnox]

Good to see someone ELSE is using MS's monopolistic behavior to their advantage.

Re:Good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. "I'm warning you. If we can't work out a deal, I'm gonna go stick my head in the lion's mouth". Seems like a weak threat to me.

Re:Good to see

[Adriax]

Wasn't REAL one of the companies complaining to the EU about microsoft forcing bundling of mediaplayer with windows and not including competitors players like realplayer?

That's like kicking the lion while petting it and sticking your head in.

Answer for Real is obvious!

[daveschroeder]

http://sarovar.org/projects/playfair/ :P

The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[MurrayTodd]

As much as I love my Macs, having shifted away from Linux the day the first OS X Public Beta was released, I have to admit I really get annoyed by Apple's draconian behavior when it comes to holding onto hardware monopolies.

It's very much like Microsoft, but with a twist. Some of my least favorite stunts:

1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.

2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.

3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)

The iPod Quicktime-AAC is just another example. Where Microsoft fights to protect it's OS dominence, Apple refuses to make its customers' lives better if it suggests that they might loose the odd dollar in missed hardware sales opportunities.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Seth Finklestein]

1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.

Or you could just buy an superiour quality DVD recorder from a third-party. Unlike Microsoft, Apple allows you to use all standards-compliant hardware with their DVD burning software.

2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.

Funny that you mention LDAP; Apple supports LDAP in its acclaimed Mail application, so you don't need to write so much as a speck of code to enable it. Getting LDAP support to work is easy as pie.

I don't subscribe to .Mac, yet I can still use every iApp with ease. Perhaps Joe Sixpack needs his hand held, but I don't.

3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)

Such is the price of progress. Face it: USB cameras simply don't have the throughput to push television-quality video the likes of which iChat AV with Pixlet can support. Would you take vacation photos with a so-called "camera phone"? I know I wouldn't. My wife and children enjoy seeing me using iSight: it's a high-quality multivisual experience. Sorry that your piece-of-junk QuickCam won't work with it.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[SlamMan]

Well, that first one's not to accurate. Pop out your combo drive, toss in a Superdrive. You can't buy it directly from Apple but what other computer manufacturer sells you upgrade parts?

Or get an external one. They work great too.

The iSync API pisses me off as well though. We'd love to develop inhouse syncing conduits, but can't.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone can license AAC. Real expects iPod to support it's store. iPod already has a store...iTunes. Why must Apple bend to Glaser, or even Micrsoft for that matter. Microsoft is coming out with it's xbox verion of the ipod soon. We'll see.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[thaddjuice]

Actually, you can upgrade to a superdrive: http://www.mcetech.com/dvdr8xdt-d.html

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

1- What is preventing you from buying an external DVD-R drive?
They cost way less than a new computer.

2- Again, you are free to use the myriad of 3rd party product.
Apple doesn't force you to use thier apps.

3- iChat is there to sell iSight camera. Like the iTunes music
store are there to sell iPod. You can, again, use another piece of software to get your usb camera to work.

Are you also complaining about not being able to use Ford parts in your GM...

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mccalli]

...Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)

You exaggerate massively, in fact. No USB devices work without a third-party driver, but all firewire cams work. I use iChat AV via a JVC camcorder, for example.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[daveschroeder]

1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.

Actually, anyone is free to add any internal or external hardware device they wish, including DVD+/-R/RW drives. However, if you wanted to use *specific* software, like iDVD, with your drive, then you needed to mirror one of Apple's OEM offerings with your purchase. The reason Apple tried to tie iDVD to their "SuperDrive" systems was more one of ensuring a very cohesive user experience, as opposed to the nightmare of support issues and bad reputation for iDVD as people with 400 MHz G4s tried to use iDVD with any old random DVD recorder.

2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.

It's only a matter of time before there's an iSync SDK. And the second statement is kind of unrelated; if you think .Mac is overpriced, don't use it.

3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)

ANY FireWire video source will work with iChat AV. Any video source at all will work with iChatUSBCam. Again, this decision was made to ensure a good user experience across the board with iChat AV, rather than letting people use any old crappy USB camera, which, right or wrong, reflects poorly on iChat AV.

There is a reason why Apple products work and look great: because Apple tries hard to keep it that way.

The iPod Quicktime-AAC is just another example. Where Microsoft fights to protect it's OS dominence, Apple refuses to make its customers' lives better if it suggests that they might loose the odd dollar in missed hardware sales opportunities.

Well, first, you have to have a monopoly to start talking about monopolistic practices. Even with iPod, Apple doesn't have nearly a "monopoly". And QuickTime, while proprietary, is one of the best media architectures out there, with free live encoding, free streaming servers for multiple platforms, ability to use open standards for playback anywhere, etc. Not to mention that it was primarily Apple and Apple alone that made MPEG-4's licensing - one of the only hopes against Microsoft's VC9 - licensing leaps and bounds more palatable than it originally was. And Apple has to keep its hardware sales up, lest the analysts start a death knell for the 1000th time.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Jeff DeMaagd]

USB cameras simply don't have the throughput to push television-quality video

Apple's camera isn't TV quality either. TV quality video requires at minimum a three-chip camera, and they don't sell for less than $1500.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[SiliconRedox]

While i agree with most of these points I've had a fairly good experience with firewire cameras other than the iSight. Particularly the fireI series of cameras. Not as cheap as an off the shelf USB cam (which, undoubtedly needs to be supported), but not a hardware lock in by any means

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Seth Finklestein]

I don't actually own a so-called "television," so I watch all my shows using the Internet. The iSight produces images and video that flow just as smoothly as the liberated videos I download daily. And for less than $150, you simply cannot beat the price.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Octagon Most]

At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, I disagree with part of your assertion. Apple does indeed lock hardware owners into an upgrade cycle of buying a new computer for new technology instead of easy upgrading. That's the Faustian bargain of being a Mac owner. I accept it but understand why many don't. Part of the equation is that the hardware is tightly controlled to maintain the usability standards. Would you really want the platform open to the point that you could slap any old hardware in there and pray for no driver conflicts? If so then there is a platform already that works that way. But that's another topic....

Where I differ in opinion is with your complaint about Apple locking their software to their own expensive hardware and services.

"2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up [...] keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.

3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work [...] with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)"

It's Apple's sales strategy to develop free, or low cost, software to sell additional hardware and services. I hardly see anything wrong with that. In fact it's a great strategy since the software is excellent and there are alternatives available so you are not locked in. You can use AIM or Yahoo messenger instead of iChat if you choose. Yes, I wish my Logitech camera worked with iChat AV because I don't want to buy the expensive iSight camera. But I think it's fair that they give me a great IM program and offer advanced video features if I choose to use the supported hardware. Again, I can choose otherwise and am not locked in. Same with iSync, it's free and works with a lot of things out of the box. But you get more if you buy their .Mac service. It would be nice to have great software for free that does everything we want it to, but it's perfectly legitimate for Apple to recoup their development costs for those programs by using them to sell more stuff.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Milo Fungus]

The driver made by IOXperts runs my Logitech QuickCam 3000 Pro just fine, and gives me much more flexibility than Logitech's stinking software does. There are lots of options for changing the video size, and the video and audio compression. I was pretty upset when I first bought my mac and learned that Logitech has orphaned the QuickCam Pro 3000 on mac OS X, but as soon as I had it up and running with the IOXperts driver I was happy to have better software anyway. (Logitech's customer support recommends buying the QuickCam Pro 4000 for use on OS X. Jerks.)

I also tried macam, but it didn't seem to work very well. Perhaps I was using it incorrectly.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[DharmaDog]

1. I'm not sure what you are talking about here. It sounds like you are suggesting that it is impossible to add a new drive to a PowerMac. If this is what you are saying, then you couldn't be more wrong. I have a dual 533 G4 that originally shipped with a Sony CDRW drive. I later upgraded this Mac to a 4x Pioneer Superdrive (model 105). It is mounted internally and was immediately able to burn CDs and DVDs without installing any software or changing any settings. The only thing I had to install was iDVD for movie DVD creation and Apple's DVD Player for watching DVD movies, but burning was automatically there.

2. I don't think this concerns the majority of Mac users. And you don't need .Mac to use iSync.

3. You already admitted you were exaggerating. But the iSight is much better than any USB camera I've seen. Apple wants to provide a superior solution to problems like video chatting. In order to do so they realize that it is best to sometimes provide both the hardware and the software for the job in order to increase the likelihood that the solution will work better than any alternative out there. And in this case, it does.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[NaugaHunter]

1) You can probably buy just iLife, though I'm not certain. If you're referring to the fact that it was a lack of software, that is. If so the 'problem' was licensing fees for the software were paid base on CPU sales, so until iDVD was sold alone they'd have been in breach of contract, at least technically, so you'd have to use someone else's software.

2) This is true, but I wouldn't consider this a "stunt". There's other syncing software, or if you have something in particular in mind you could right it. This would only be a MS tactic if they prevented you from writing your own, not for not sharing theirs. There are two possible altruistic reasons:a) it's not stable enough to release, or b) it's not secure enough to release. iSync right now can access my iDisk using stored information. If they open up the API they have to make sure whatever accessing it is allowed to, which may be difficult.

3) Their testing showed that USB cameras didn't work well enough for what they wanted iChatAV to do. If they let any camera connect and it worked like crap people would probably blame iChat and not the camera. I thought it would work w/ other firewire cameras, but I've never tested it. The help seems to indicate it would.

4) I'm not certain what you think the QT-AAC is an example of. AAC is a known standard anyone could use. Are you talking about Fairplay? They needed a DRM or record companies wouldn't have bought in. I'm not sure how that's a refusal to make customer's lives better - iTunes and iPods work together with little fuss, since they make them both. Makes my life better. How would being able to buy from Real make life better? Pro: Possibly different music selection. Con: Possible software conflicts when connecting. Possible library corruption from updating from both services. Less leverage to encourage artists/labels to go to iTunes Music Store. On balance, that doesn't seem better to me.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Del Vach]

2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up. There are millions of really cool things I could do to make Apple able to synchronize with things like LDAP servers, competing browsers, PC's, etc. But then Apple could use it as a leverage-point to keep people subscribing to the overpriced .Mac program.

Funny that you mention LDAP; Apple supports LDAP in its acclaimed Mail application, so you don't need to write so much as a speck of code to enable it. Getting LDAP support to work is easy as pie.

I don't subscribe to .Mac, yet I can still use every iApp with ease. Perhaps Joe Sixpack needs his hand held, but I don't.

While the LDAP integration is handy, I don't think it addresses the original poster's point.

My company has a fairly extendable product suite that includes mail, calendar, and contact management. If I could write an iSync conduit to our database, I'd be able to check my calendar and get alarms from my Powerbook, iPod or Bluetooth phone.

That would let me use the interface(s) I like with the data I need, and would let us market OS X as a fully-supported platform. No, my company would probably never have an impact on Apple's bottom line, but as it stands now we can only offer syncronization with Windows users. In the meantime I've got this great all-in-one syncing solution that's completely useless to me, which is pretty frustrating.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Yohahn]

Here here

I deal with usb-dvd drives. There was a very popular hack to make iTunes work for recording with various non-apple-approved hardware. It worked well and easily. When they moved to Panther, they changed the config file to an XML format (good move), but they also diabled the hack by not recognizing some changes to this xml file.

I'm one of those Linux users that might have considered the Mac for a Desktop or laptop at one point, but after seeing that kind of behavior I wouldn't consider even recommending them now.

(They were keying on the IDENT string of the drive. By using the ident you can identiy a vendor's driver to run with. ATAPI/the MMC command set, is a standard, but even it has ambiguities. Vendors tend to be consistant in how they work, within their chipsets.

The old hack was to change the ident string in the file for the appropriate vendor, to match the drive you had.

When you changed this in the new xml file, it still didn't recognize the drive for writing in iTunes, but it did change in the disk formatting utility)

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[log0n]

iChat AV works with any video firewire device (dv camcorders, dv decks, firewire webcams - there are a few). The limitation you have comes from Apple progressing with technology, not supporting depreciated lesser hardware.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Old, old apple again.

I recall fighting against them recognizing the string of SCSI disk in the mid 90's. Patching resources just so it could format a scsi drive. Ended up formatting my mac drives from a NeXTstation (which took a couple of seconds instead of a full hour).

What a pain apple is as a company as soon as you don't use only latest version of apple apporved hardware...

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[lamz]

3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work (well) and Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)

You know what else doesn't work? Serial-port cameras! Of course, Firewire cameras are plug and play, but that fact doesn't make your point, does it?

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Midnight Thunder]

Well, first, you have to have a monopoly to start talking about monopolistic practices. Even with iPod, Apple doesn't have nearly a "monopoly". And QuickTime, while proprietary, is one of the best media architectures out there, with free live encoding, free streaming servers for multiple platforms, ability to use open standards for playback anywhere, etc. Not to mention that it was primarily Apple and Apple alone that made MPEG-4's licensing - one of the only hopes against Microsoft's VC9 - licensing leaps and bounds more palatable [com.com] than it originally was [com.com]. And Apple has to keep its hardware sales up, lest the analysts start a death knell [google.com] for the 1000th time.


Should also mention that AAC is not Apple's code. Quicktime's file format specs are fully published. It is proprietary, but available for implementation. After that its just down to the codecs. I am still looking for the WMA specs on the Microsoft site.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike Microsoft, Apple allows you to use all standards-compliant hardware with their DVD burning software.

And when was the last time you could not upgrade a Windows box because Windows was not starndards compliant....

Please dont make laugh soo hard.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[daviddennis]

The world's cheapest 3CCD camcorder is just $699.

This looks like it's very similar to the more expensive version with still capability (which you really shouldn't bother with in a video camera). It was given a review which praised the image quality but admitted it didn't reach the peak of the top 3CCD camcorders.

I have to admit that I wasn't thrilled by the iSight camera's quality; a friend demoed it to me and my $500 Canon ZR-series video camera was much better. However, that might have been due to the extreme low light in her apartment.

That being said, I was able to try a LogiTech QuickCam on my PowerMac G4 at work and if my memory serves it worked just fine. I think the cheaper brands don't support the Mac, but the QuickCam's cheap enough and it does.

D

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

The iSync API point is really frustrating to me, especially since Palm says they will no longer support macs directly (sure you might be able to Mark/Space tools), but I want to write a simple iSync conduit to sync my stickies as text with my palm. I can't find any documentation on the iSync API to do this, because Apple chooses to make the API private. I am sure as hell not buying a bluetooth phone to replace my Treo 600...

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mbbac]

iChat will work with any camera that supports the FireWire IIDC profile. There are even some programs that can emulate the IIDC for USB cameras.

You can buy DVD recorders and DVD recording software for you Mac. Apple isn't stopping you.

I agree with you on the iSync part. Hopefully it will eventually be a published API.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mbbac]

iChat doesn't use Pixlet. It uses the industry standard H.263 video codec. Look at the summary for the (currently) third link in those Google results.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[cheide]

The reason Apple tried to tie iDVD to their "SuperDrive" systems was more one of ensuring a very cohesive user experience, as opposed to the nightmare of support issues and bad reputation for iDVD as people with 400 MHz G4s tried to use iDVD with any old random DVD recorder.

The story I've heard is that it's actually because of the MPEG-2 licensing. They didn't want to have to pay the license fee for *every* copy of iDVD or iLife sold or given away, so they tied it to the SuperDrive instead. Thus they don't want people using iDVD with a third-party DVD burner since they haven't actually paid the license fee yet. Of course this is also just hearsay...

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[passthecrackpipe]

and by "liberated" you mean "stolen", right? You don't own a television, you say - well, that is probably because you send all your money to Steve Jobs, for his crazy overpriced hardware, unstable operating system, and half-assed unfinished applications, thus reducing you to thievery. pathetic.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mlrtime]

Mind telling me how to use iDVD with a non-apple superior quality DVD recorder on a powerbook?

didn't think so...

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[bsartist]

I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.

False. You can use any standard ATAPI optical drive internally. I pulled an old 8x CD-R drive from my PeeCee and dropped it in my formerly DVD-RAM equipped Mac. No problems at all, aside from the fact that I had to buy a set of allen wrenches to remove the plastic bits.

Apple seems to have put blocks into place to refuse iChat AV from working with anything but their iSight hardware product.

Can you provide any evidence to support this claim? I connected my FireWire camcorder (an older Sony DCR-TRV11), and it works with iChat without a hitch.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Phrack]

Hmm... guess I should rip out my Powerlogix G4 upgrade out of my Powerbook. It obviously doesn't work. Oh, wait.. I'm using it now.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[MoneyT]

Plug it into the firewire port?

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[TheRaven64]

Has your company approached Apple about this? While they may not post everything on their web site, they are usually quite good about giving developers access to things that will make their hardware more appealing to potential customers (although they may require an NDA).

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Thanks for furthering the stereotype against us Mac users as elitist idiots. Have a nice day.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[TheRaven64]

You could also add that the QuickTime .mov format is the official container format for the MPEG-4 specification.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mlrtime]

iDVD only works with superdrives. If you have a powerbook with a combo and an external burner you cannot even install iDVD.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

At least for the contact information, it (superficially) looks like Apple has a documented API for interacting with the contact database. For calendar, they've got links to the standards and some Perl code which deal with that interface.

It seems to me that iSync is not the problem. The problem is that your database wants to be the main repository, whereas Mac OS X applications use the standards-based Mail, vCard, and iCalendar files. iSync is supposed to (and does) support portable devices that want to synchronize to the standards-based files. It isn't supposed to be a translator that supports multiple databases on the host computer.

The real solution would be for your program to update the host computer's Mail, vCard, and iCalendar files, maintaining additional meta-data in your own format for what you want to use.

iSync supports third-party hardware (Bluetooth phones, Palm pilots) just fine.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Just Some Guy]

OS X's LDAP support in the address book application is just as bad as in KDE's address book. You can do searches of a directory, but that's it - no editing or entry creation is supported (at least as of Jaguar).

In the context of iSync, which works with a Palm (or phone or whatever) against a user's address book, this means that it doesn't offer a way to sync LDAP entries to those in the other device.

I'd love to be able to set up a single, centralized address database for my household, so that my wife and I don't have to maintain our own separate lists of friends and acquaintances ("Hey, is Heidi's number 123-3456?" "No, that's her old number. Now it's 123-4543."). Apple seems to be uninterested in making this happen natively.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Seth Finklestein]

Dear Sir,

I make enough money to buy more televisions than you. I simply choose to enjoy my television programmes in a more free fashion. They're already being provided for free over the airwaves -- assuming that you've paid your licence fee. Are you trying to tell me that it is "thievery" to simply avoid watching the adverts?

I shall inform the Queen the next time you go to the loo during an advert break on your so-called "programmes."

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[madmancarman]

1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.

I know other people in this thread have given you some general replies, saying you can use just about any DVD burner with Toast or other third-party software. While all this is true, I'm going to be a little more specific to help you out. I have a PowerMac G4/Dual 500, and it also came with a DVD-ROM drive. A couple months ago, after doing a little research online, I found some sites that suggested any of the Pioneer DVD-RW drives are compatible with iTunes, iDVD, etc. I also stopped by an Apple store and had the guy at the genius bar write down what model was in their Superdrive-equipped PowerMacs, which ended up being the Pioneer DVR-105 (retails as the A05).

I ended up buying a Pioneer DVR-106 (also sold as the A06) from newegg.com, and it's worked like a champ. Burns in iTunes, iDVD, Toast, the Finder, etc. without a problem, and I haven't made a coaster yet. Newegg sells the Pioneer DVR-107 (8x DVD+/-RW) in black for $112 at the moment, so you might want to pick one up and pop it in your PowerMac. Since the 106 that I own is a step above the standard Superdrive, I wouldn't doubt that Mac OS X will pick up the 107 with no problem at all.

Just thought I'd clear up an issue that had been annoying me as well until I did some research and took a chance. Good luck!

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[toddhisattva]

I don't have .Mac, so I don't know what all it does. But I do know some of it is built on WebDAV, and people are trying to do .Mac stuff without .Mac

Home of WebDAV

Running Apple's Backup Without a .Mac Account

iSync without .Mac (incomplete)

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Though I shouldn't feed the trolls, i feel inspired to toss a log onto the fire...

"you send all your money to Steve Jobs, for his crazy overpriced hardware, unstable operating system, and half-assed unfinished applications, thus reducing you to thievery. pathetic."

Actually the money goes to Apple Computer, Inc. and it's shareholders like myself. Mr. Jobs is paid a single dollar (yep, thats one $1) per year salary. (though is stock holding and benefits are rather nice I would imagine).

As for overpriced hgardware... have you ever checked out the prices on some of Alienware's PCs? Whats overpriced about a $999 all in one eMac (http://www.apple.com/emac/)? Apple is not a commodity computer company like many of the Windows based hardware computer makers, they are instead interested in designing solutions and they have fgound that the best way to achieve success for the company is to closely integrate the hardwar eand software, which seems to offer the great stability.

As for "half-assed unfinished applications," could you please offer an example?

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[dasmegabyte]

If you wish your Logitech camera worked with iChatAV, complain to Logitech. They're the ones that need to write a driver for it.

All firewire devices work, because all firewire devices use the same hardware interface for accessing video. USB devices, on the other hand, have many different interfaces. Therefore, they need proprietary drivers. Apple can't be expected to write a driver for every USB webcam on the market...that's like expecting Ford to offer an adapter for every kind of windshield wiper.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[ndpatel]

man, you didn't even try, did you?

it took google .17 seconds to solve your problem.

here, i'll even give you the damn link: external drives in idvd

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[mlrtime]

"Apple allows you to use all standards-compliant hardware with their DVD burning software."

This is hack, apple does not support this.

Also, you need another hack to install idvd4 on a powerbook with a combo drive. How exactly is apple allowing me to do all this?

The point being, they are just as guilty as other h/w manufactures.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Del Vach]

I should have clarified. Our software is actually web-based, storing this information in MySQL, so the problem isn't disparity between multiple databases on a single system, it's in trying to actually replicate .Mac syncronization services.

Were we able to sync to a machine's OS X's contact/calendar data from PHP or JSP, it would trickle down to third-party hardware beautifully. I've made some limited progress in vCard & vCal export, but even polished that approach would offer a one-way solution, which defeats the elegance and simplicity of using iSync.

(Thanks for links!)

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Ahaldra]

I'm not sure what you are really trying to accomplish, but have you tried SIMBL, who allows patching an application? (See here for an example of how to patch Safari (use the source)) There is also classdump if you want to override classes. And the author of saft used these tools to patch Safari too. If you are longing for it so much as you say why shouldn't it be possible to do the same thing with iSync?

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[suzerain]

Same with iSync, it's free and works with a lot of things out of the box. But you get more if you buy their .Mac service. It would be nice to have great software for free that does everything we want it to, but it's perfectly legitimate for Apple to recoup their development costs for those programs by using them to sell more stuff.

I love the Mac platform, since I use it every day. In my spare time, I have even started a Mac games listing site that's run out of my own pocket.

However, with iSync, I can't even sync my stuff between my laptop and desktop without subscribing to .Mac. That's just ridiculous. .Mac should be there to make things easy over the Internet (you know, publishing your photos, etc.) But to put in a needless block on the software to get me to sign up for a service that I don't need is disgusting to me.

Note that in Panther, Apple has also removed the "Internet" System control panel, so you have to launch Safari in order to tell the operating system that you *don't* want to use Safari as the default browser (how logical). And, they didn't even bother to tell people how to do that! That's pretty Microsoftian, in my opinion.

I love Apple's products. I choose to do my development work on them. But you've got to call them jerks when they do something jerk-worthy, just like you've got to praise them when they do something great (like FireWire, or zeroconf, or OS X, or Powerbooks...etc. and so on).

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[gamgee5273]

Well, to be fair, why is someone using an address book application to edit the directory for an organization? Should that be the LDAP admin's responsibility?

Address Book is there for you to create your own local address book and to do directory lookups. It is not a directry admin tool, nor should it be.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[gamgee5273]

Um... dude, you're wrong. Even my VCR, connected to my Dazzle Hollywood FireWire DV bridge is recognized as a "camera" in iChat. The camera has to be FireWire, that's all.

What is interesting, though is that it is a "mirror image" of the video being played from the VCR. But, keep in mind, this is through a DV bridge.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Just Some Guy]

Well, to be fair, why is someone using an address book application to edit the directory for an organization? Should that be the LDAP admin's responsibility?

Ask Ximian why that gave that feature to Evolution. In a large corporation, you'd have a strong point. In a small organization, though, it's convenient for end users to be able to change their own personal information. If Joe works in an office with 10 people, and he gets a new phone number, why should he have to pester the LDAP admin? In a home environment, it's wonderfully convenient to have a centralized directory shared by all household members. If everyone uses Evolution, then they have that capability.

Address Book is there to be an address book. Who cares what the backend happens to be?

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[SlamMan]

Not the Dazzle (although I prefer the Canopus products), iChat just does that for whatever reason. If you use a different firewire video viewer, it'll show up fine. Grab Video Capture off version tracker if you want to check it out, and of course Broadcaster, and the variations of FinalCut also do it.

Re:The ol' Hardware Monopoly

[Phroggy]

Wow, thanks for the iChatUSBCam link, I'll definitely try that!

The 'other' memo:

[lacrymology.com]

Dear Apple,

Please please please open Fair Play to use. Please please please. We'll be your best friend. Promise. Plllllleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaassssee! Come on, be a pal! Please please please.

Love,
Real

-m

Re:The 'other' memo:

[lukewarmfusion]

I thought it was a little more like:

Stevie, plz let me use it. omg i will give u lots of $$. U R sooooo kewl n i wnt 2 be like u!!!!11

r341-1337 (30.

ps-plz?

Re:The 'other' memo:

[Octagon Most]

"Stevie, plz let me use it. omg i will give u lots of $$. U R sooooo kewl n i wnt 2 be like u!!!!11"

You forgot liberal use of "lol."

Re:The 'other' memo:

[AndroidCat]

Steve should keep walking and not make eye-contact. It just encourages them.

Re:The 'other' memo:

[FattMattP]

No it's:

Dear Apple, Please please please [BUFFERING] open Fair Play to [ BUFFERING... BUFFERING] use. Please please please. We'll be

[Connection lost. Please reopen letter.]

Re:The 'other' memo:

[Anthony Boyd]

r341-1337 (30.

It's pathetic that I understood that without even thinking about it.

Closed standards.

[commo1]

That's all we need: two closed source, proprietary standards getting more powerful. On the upside, only one proprietary player/codec to download. Only one proprietary player/codec for us to develop & release. Only one organizatino to rally against when they abuse their power. Also, I wonder how this would affect the standard use of Real? Would streaming video & audio suddenly becoe available in some future form of iPod?

Re:Closed standards.

[LionMage]

That's all we need: two closed source, proprietary standards getting more powerful. On the upside, only one proprietary player/codec to download.

What the hell are you babbling about, and how did this get modded +4 Interesting?

I can't speak to Real's formats being proprietary, although as I understand it, they are based upon open standards. Rather, I'll focus on AAC.

AAC is an open standard, part of the MPEG4 specification. Anyone can license it. The objectionable part of Apple's for-pay music store is the FairPlay DRM that is used to wrap the AAC content. FairPlay isn't an open standard, although supposedly it can be licensed; since Apple didn't actually create FairPlay, one could theoretically license the technology from the developer, although I have no idea whether Apple has an exclusive agreement with them.

Rather than parroting someone's party line in a blatant attempt at karma whoring, you might try qualifying your statements and making sure you specify their scope.

Also, I wonder how this would affect the standard use of Real? Would streaming video & audio suddenly becoe available in some future form of iPod?

It's unlikely Apple would use someone else's streaming media technology when they have streaming video and audio support in Quicktime that is "good enough." At that point, the real question is whether Apple can introduce a product that is a souped-up iPod that supports real time streaming media (presumably over a wireless connection), and do so at a price point where consumers will buy the product in appreciable quantities. If the user experience and the cost are both excellent, fine; otherwise, it makes no sense to even talk about selling such a product.

My thoughts on the players

[novakane007]

I love the AAC format. I use Winamp Pro to play and encode songs with AAC.
I despise Real Player and it's unreasonable level of pop-ups and advertising. It is one of the most invasive pieces of software out there.

Re:My thoughts on the players

[lotsofno]

Actually, with Winamp (all versions, including free), you can even listen to iTMS' DRM'ed AAC tracks with a simple plug-in.

Hell, you can even listen to Real's audio tracks without even having to install anything, if you want.

If they don't want to open up their propietary DRM'ed formats, open them up for them.

Real looking for a reason to exist

[Ars-Fartsica]

It won't find one. For whatever reason - a crappy client, death-by-Microsoft, etc...Real is no longer relevant in the media marketplace. It had to happen - between Quicktime/AAC, Windows Media, MP3, and even Ogg, there was no room whatsoever for a codec, client, and company with nothing to offer.

Real won't be missed, it hasn't done anything of value to the marketplace or userbase for years now.

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[Octagon Most]

"Real won't be missed, it hasn't done anything of value to the marketplace or userbase for years now."

I'm not a historian on this issue, but didn't Real pioneer bringing TV and radio content to the masses through its subscription service? I have no desire to defend them, but I also don't vilify them as much as many here do. I thought they were first to bring things like streaming broadcasts of MLB games as well as prurient interests like the Big Brother feeds from the CBS "reality" show. You can argue that none of that was particularly valuable, sure, but didn't Real nonetheless accomplish something by leading and developing the streaming content market?

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right.

Either get table scraps from Apple or wait for Microsoft to eat everything.

He knows Real is screwed.

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[The Lynxpro]

"It won't find one. For whatever reason - a crappy client, death-by-Microsoft, etc...Real is no longer relevant in the media marketplace. It had to happen - between Quicktime/AAC, Windows Media, MP3, and even Ogg, there was no room whatsoever for a codec, client, and company with nothing to offer."

And that's the very reason why I think it would be smart for Apple to allow an alliance with Real. Apple won't be losing anything, and at the very least, they have "wiggle room" if there is some sort of monopoly charge thrown at them. It pays to remember that Microsoft was able to get the government (FCC and FTC) to place conditions on AOL during the AOL Time Warner merger stating that AOL had to open up AIM to 1 competitor before it enabled advanced features such as video messaging as part of the merger. Microsoft was concerned about AOL's "monopoly" in instant messaging (via owning AIM and ICQ) to the detriment of Microsoft's MSN Messenger (poor monopolist Microsoft). So the advantage here is Apple can say that the iPod is indeed an open platform while still continuing to snub the real threat, which is WMA.

The second smart thing would be for Apple to buy Roxio. Roxio is bleeding because of Napster, so a quick Apple purchase would shut down iTunes's nearest competitor and Apple could integrate Roxio's Toast6 (or 7) into OS X 10.4 or 10.5 while still continuing to profit off Easy Media Creator and funnel the profits into Mac development of the iLife suite and anything else they'd like. It would also be yet another sucker punch to WMA in the process.

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[green_crocadilian]

True, the Windows client is spyware-ridden. But in my experience, the Real codec for audio provides a decent sound at much lower bitrates than just about anything else. It's just that the maximum quality it attains is kind of sucky... Anyway, if you want an almost flawless-sounding 3.5 minutes of jazz weighing in at 500 K, you have to use Real.

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[Anonymous Coward]

I can burn data CD's with Finder, audio CD's (and mp3 CD's) with iTunes, and make DVD's with iDVD. Why do I need Roxio again?

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Player is still the most downloaded media player... so where are you getting your facts from?

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[beakburke]

Well of course real is the most downloaded, Windows media player ships with windows, so it doesn't need to be downloaded. And quicktime player comes free on the Mac.

To review, windows users only DL Real and QT, mac users only DL WMP and Real if they want. Real is the only one that needs to be DLed on both platforms.

Re:Real looking for a reason to exist

[The Lynxpro]

"I can burn data CD's with Finder, audio CD's (and mp3 CD's) with iTunes, and make DVD's with iDVD. Why do I need Roxio again?"

Burning with Finder? You mean dragging the icon to the Trash Can? Sorry, that doesn't cut it. For serious burning, you still need Toast6 or something like it on OS X. It just seems to me that since Roxio is now a competitor of Apple's via Napster, it would make sense for Apple to acquire them not only to shut Napster down but also to implement serious burning software directly into the OS. Apple could do that whereas Microsoft would have difficulty on antitrust grounds (Nero would protest the feature-creep).

forced to look towards Microsoft ?!?

[ThomasFlip]

Is that really a threat ? Does Rob Glaser really think Microsoft would ally with Real networks ? I could see Microsoft maybe buying them out, but has Microsoft ever allied with direct competition ? It seems like more of an empty threat to me.

Re:forced to look towards Microsoft ?!?

[ack154]

Especially since Real is one of the big reasons that MS now owes the EU (or whoever over there) a ton of $$. I think it would be funny to see MS buy them out just for that... well, that and to get rid of Real and their crappy player/files.

Re:forced to look towards Microsoft ?!?

[kubrick]

Glaser used to work for MS, before he left to form "Progressive Networks" (it's on p2). I thought it interesting that either his politics changed, or he needed to not alienate investors, thus the change of name to "Real Networks".

Of course, he must have burnt a few bridges during the anti-trust trial... but these people are businessmen, if there's money to be made by kissing and making up then they'll do it (vide McNealy and Ballmer).

Re:forced to look towards Microsoft ?!?

[fulldecent]

google

Re:forced to look towards Microsoft ?!?

[bshroyer]

Good point.

Imagine a large real goods manufacturer going to Target and saying: "Let's make a deal. If you don't want to deal with me, I'm going to be forced to go talk to Wal-Mart."

It doesn't exactly indicate that you're negotiating from a position of strength when your "threat" alternative is to sell your soul to the devil.

I won't be sad to see them go, if it comes to that.

Real...y?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they'll all reject Real and it'll just go away!!!

Re:Real...y?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or... both Apple and M$ will join forces against real!

P.S. Satans heating bill is looking distinctly high!

Re:Real...y?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real: Hey, Apple, I think you should join up with us. I mean, otherwise, we're just going to go to Microsoft.

Apple: Why would you need to be teaming up with anyone if you weren't already becoming irrelevant? Go away. Oh, and I'm going to post your request on the net, and expose you for the sad freaks you are.

Real: Awww! Hey, uh, Microsoft. Don't you think you should team up with us and destroy Apple?

Microsoft: Oh sure, you think I want to play second fiddle? I saw your note to Apple! Get lost.

Real: Woe is me! I die... I die... I die...

Me: It's time to party like the USA just elected a toaster as president!

Is it me....

[wazzzup]

or does the NY Times photo of Glazer make him look like he lives in a van down by the river?

And hitting the government cheese pretty hard as well ;o)

uhm...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's more like a threat than a 'beg'.
"we'll go to MS if you don't go with us..."
pfft.

Karma Whore - Reg Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/business/media/1 5real.html?ex=1082606400&en=766d7abf51c0291f&ei=50 62&partner=GOOGLE

Steve - Please Say NO

[pauly_thumbs]

Steve this would be a bad move - Real is so mismanaged and screwed up that they have the reverse midas touch - meaning everything they touch turns to crap.

here's a business plan:

1)Keep the IPod under Apple's strict control
2)let Real go to MS.
3)rake in more dough
4)Real floats off into elliott bay during next earthquake in seattle

Re:Steve - Please Say NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse Midas touch would mean that they turn gold things into non-gold things. Also, why is it that people use Midas touch to mean something good (this isn't specifically directed at you)? Midas turned everything he touched into gold, which seemed like a blessing but was actually a curse, because he could never touch anything or anyone without turning them to gold.

Re:Steve - Please Say NO

[TheRaven64]

Sure, having the Midas touch would be bad (just imagine taking a crap). On the other hand, knowing someone who had it would be useful (well, until they starved to death).

I actually think this could be good

[Dark Paladin]

Granted, I don't care for real, even though "Air America" seems to like it (hello? Streamed MP3, folks - more universal, damn it!)

Anyway. It all boils down to "What does Apple want?" If it wants to sell iPods, this is part of the whole "killer move" thing. Right now, I can use my iPod with iTunes Music Store and Audible.com. And since I already shelled out $300 for this portable hard drive/music player, if you're not compatible, I don't want to hear it.

Licensing Fairplay to Real (and yes, I know that Fairplay isn't owned by Apple, but I'm willing to bet they've got an "exclusive agreement" and enough clout to convince the actual owners to let Real in on the fun) would, as the header notes, make the iPod work with Rhapsody. I'm not about to sign up for Rhapsody, but all of the sudden, those "Apple's trying to lock you into their own technology" arguments go out the window. And it sets a good precident: ask Apple nicely, and you can use their service.

But - this is only if Apple sees the prize as iPods. If they see the prize as becoming the de facto standard for online music, which would put them in a very powerful position, they could say "Hm - we have about 60% of all legal music downloads now, and the #1 portable MP3 players. Forget it, Real."

Personally, I think a combination of the two is in order: license with Real as they did with Audible.com. Let Real sell "iPod compatible" songs off of Rhapsody and whatever - but make those same tunes available through iTMS, just like you can buy Audible's site or through the iTunes interface. Everybody gets to sell something, and Apple will gain the "subscription services" so people can pick and choose thier poisen.

Of course, I could be totally wrong - but I won't mind if this scenario plays out.

Re:I actually think this could be good

[Seth Finklestein]

Air America and RealNetworks are allied on political lines. Maria Cantwell, one of Real's founders, is a prominent Democrat. I have it on good authority that Air America pays absolutely zero dollars for its so-called "webcasting" software.

Re:I actually think this could be good

[Dark Paladin]

Well, that explains things.

Bugger all.

Re:I actually think this could be good

[mrtrumbe]

Hi "Seth." (What is his name in quotes? Click the link on his sig or view his journal.)

Just wondering if you can provide even a shred of evidence for your claim. I understand the issue of protecting sources, but I don't generally trust the claims of posters with a history of malicious behavior without backup.

BTW, does NPR pay for their Real streaming license? They are, after all, the radio equivilent of a liberal rag, so Ms. Help-Out-All-Fellow-Democrats must be funding them as well, no?

Bleh.

Taft

Re:I actually think this could be good

[TheRaven64]

Apple wants a vertical monopoly. They're not out to get 100% of the market share in any particular area (not that they wouldn't like to, but sometimes some reality slips in past even Steve's Distortion Field(TM)). They want to control the entire user experience for their customers. Personally, I'm happy for them to do this. As long as they don't achieve a horizontal monopoly, they can only compete by providing a good service. An alliance with Real would mean that they would lose control of a portion of their vertical stack, and this would be contrary to their established business practices (i.e. third parties are welcome to make anything they want which interfaces with Apple hardware, as long as it does not compete directly with an Apple product).

Re:I actually think this could be good

[rjung2k]

I believe Cantwell is also one of the financial backers for Air America Radio, so it's not surprising that AAR and Real have a "strategic partnership" (or whatever the corporate buzzword is this week). Doesn't seem any different than any other corporate partnerships, though if AAR is getting their webcasting software for free, that'd be a problem, I'd think.

(Listening to Air America Radio right now)

Re:I actually think this could be good

[Seth Finklestein]

Hi "Mike." (If you're wondering why the name is in quotes, just read the pablum that this coward posts.)

Air America, supported by as much as $60 million from investors including RealNetworks Inc. Chairman Rob Glaser.

Any other questions, "Mike"?

Re:I actually think this could be good

[Eraser_]

Why can't Apple see this as 5 cents a song kick back for iPod compatability? In exchange, iPods bought via Real's website get Real a $10 kickback from Apple?

Real would be contractually bound to only offer songs or whatever which meet this and that criteria for sound quality, customer support, etc. The one major problem I see is that Real offers a song that iTunes has, and someone buys it from Real instead of itms, turning 30 cents into 5. Maybe all they make is 5 cents a song anyways, but you would see brand dilution.

Re:I actually think this could be good

[mrtrumbe]

Coward, eh? Why is that? Care to backup your namecalling?

Anyhow, you still have given no evidence that RealNetworks (the company) supports Air America. You have shown that RealNetworks Chairman Rob Glaser is an investor in Air America, but that's all private money. It does not show that RealNetworks is aligned politically with Air America.

In fact, given the historical lobbying efforts of most major corporations, RealNetworks would never chain themselves to a single political party. They, just like all the other big players, are paying out to anyone and everyone that will help make their corporate interests a reality.

And lets pretend you had proof that RealNetworks (the company) DID invest in Air America. Do you know for a fact that they don't also invest in conservative radio? Couldn't that investment be a tactic to expand the usage of Real formats in cyberspace? Also, your "prominent Democrat" link proves nothing. Who was Maria Cantwell running against in that election? A historical Microsoft supporter. Her running might be motivated by her interests in Real as much as by her political tendencies.

Your theories are conjecture, that is all. It might be right, but it is just as likely that you are wrong. Your "good authority" should have little meaning here as you can prove nothing.

Taft
(Despite your best efforts to equate me with the nasty Michael Sims. Yeah, I think so, too).

Re:I actually think this could be good

[Anonymous Coward]

Coward, eh? Why is that? Care to backup your namecalling?
Anyhow, you still have given no evidence that RealNetworks (the company) supports Air America. You have shown that RealNetworks Chairman Rob Glaser is an investor in Air America, but that's all private money. It does not show that RealNetworks is aligned politically with Air America.

In fact, given the historical lobbying efforts of most major corporations, RealNetworks would never chain themselves to a single political party. They, just like all the other big players, are paying out to anyone and everyone that will help make their corporate interests a reality.

And lets pretend you had proof that RealNetworks (the company) DID invest in Air America. Do you know for a fact that they don't also invest in conservative radio? Couldn't that investment be a tactic to expand the usage of Real formats in cyberspace? Also, your "prominent Democrat" link proves nothing. Who was Maria Cantwell running against in that election? A historical Microsoft supporter. Her running might be motivated by her interests in Real as much as by her political tendencies.

Your theories are conjecture, that is all. It might be right, but it is just as likely that you are wrong. Your "good authority" should have little meaning here as you can prove nothing.

tl;dr

Really now, why hasn't Real gone out of business?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm serious. How the hell do they make money anyway? Do they make spyware? Do enough people actually buy the "premium" version of Realplayer? Did they sell their corporate soul to Satan? I'm dying to know!

Very good thing for Apple to do

[TempusMagus]

This would be a VERY wise thing for Apple to do for many many reasons. However, if I were Apple I would ask something in return - allow the real-media format to play as a component of QuickTime.

Re:Very good thing for Apple to do

[metamatic]

My thought exactly. Make it part of the deal that Real formats have to be playable in QuickTime; i.e. Real has to be more than a write-only format.

Re:Very good thing for Apple to do

[Arru]

I gotta say, that's about the smartest remark on this thread yet. (even smarter than this one ;-)

There is a pretty OK free RealPlayer for the mac, but including it in Quicktime would in effect create the Real web plugin that's been waiting some time now (no, Internet Explorer 5.1 plugins do NOT count)

Still, Realmedia is an obsolete format, and they're not really on the cutting edge of reinvention either.

This whole story reminds me of when Michael Dell said that "Apple should file bancruptcy and divide the money among shareholders". It's a shame Apple didn't take this free piece of advice from what's only their main competitor...

Image!

[American AC in Paris]

Real's got a bit of a hole to climb out of on this one. Why? Because they're notorious for their abusive, invasive, and all-around unpleasant media players. This matters because Steve, for better or for worse, is extremely nitpicky about presentation and image. Real has historically failed in the arenas of user-friendliness, interface elegance, and ease-of-use. True, they're making a strong effort to pull out of that, but they've still got a ways to go.

Compare Real... The free player, while no longer buried as deep as it used to be, is still behind a text link in a grey box next to the big, shiny Premium Download button. Upon download, you're innundated with a page featuring "Real Accessories", which are little more than sponsored links to unrelated software.

...to Apple: From the Apple.com homepage, it's three clicks to the download page. Each click is non-misleading and about as obvious as you can make it (click the "iTunes and Music tab", click the big graphic in the middle of the page labelled "Download Now", select your version, and boom. You're downloading.) The confirmation page displays, among other things, the phrase "Thank You" in big, bold letters at the top of the screen. It, too, has its plugs, but they're for the iTunes Music Store and the iPod--far more relevant than the "TweakMASTER Pro", "FreeMem Pro", and "System Mechanic" software offered at Real. The layout is straightforward, doesn't try to shunt you to a more expensive alternative, and is cleaner-looking and easier to follow than the Real site.

Real is going to have a tough time of convincing Jobs that Apple really wants to associate with them...

Re:Image!

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried it, QuickTime was bugging me to buy a "pro" version.

Re:Image!

[dave420]

Your comparison is slightly skewed... Apple makes a tiny, miniscule proportion of its earnings from Quicktime players. Real, on the other hand, gets most of its revenue from them. Apple makes its money charging creative prices for hardware, so pissing people off buying a media player is not a good idea at all, as it serves no purpose.

Re:Image!

[TheRaven64]

Real is going to have a tough time of convincing Jobs that Apple really wants to associate with them...

I'm sure I remember him making a big thing about how Real Player now had a Mac version at a keynote about a year ago.

Re:Image!

[Fear the Clam]

This matters because Steve, for better or for worse, is extremely nitpicky about presentation and image.

I can just imagine Steve looking at that picture of Glazer, with his Boss Hogg face and "Burberry" tie, shaking his head and saying "Is it any wonder that everything having to do with this player is second-rate?"

Re:Image!

[American AC in Paris]

True enough, but that doesn't really change the situation. Real still has a hole to climb out of, and they'll still likely look 'ugly' to Jobs.

On the point of Real and niches...

Real once owned this niche. There was a time when anything that streamed was Real, and most video and audio clips on the web were Real encoded. They ruled the roost, and they were well-poised to maintain said position. Instead of capitalizing on this and continuing heavy-duty R&D, they shifted to an advertising-oriented revenue stream and did as much as they could to milk their (very solid) userbase dry. They leaned hard on their market dominance and released truly substandard, ad-infested software for several years. Eventually, bigger players entered the fray--Apple and Microsoft--and managed to produce formats and players that performed significantly better than Real's offering. Had Real maintained a strong focus on R&D and the technical end of things, they'd still have a loyal following and a competitive product. Instead, they decided to cash in--which cost them customer loyalty. Nobody loves Real anymore. It is, at best, accepted as the status quo in some organizations. They blew their wad to get a quick buck; now the well is running dry, and they're scampering for an easy fix. No tears for Real from me.

Re:Image!

[fatovich]

It, too, has its plugs, but they're for the iTunes Music Store and the iPod--far more relevant than the "TweakMASTER Pro", "FreeMem Pro", and "System Mechanic" software offered at Real.

They only have adds for that software because after installing it you NEED to claim back some memory, tweak your startup settings and fix your registry. Very helpfull I thought.

Re:Image!

[dave420]

Oh I remember those days. That was when you could sign up for 40gigs of storage on a website, for free :)

Real had their chance, but their greed of the almighty dollar screwed us, and them in the process.

Real dug their own grave. No-one can save their brand. They should just climb in and pray the worms are gentle.

Apple is welcome to it

[DaveCBio]

Honestly, they can have Real. I try not to use Real because I can't stand their unstable software. My experiences with Real have never been overly positive.

What would they change the name of real player to?

[FS1]

The Real apple player?
The Fairplayer?
iReal player?
or just call it the RIAA (Real itunes apple authorized) player?

Thoughts

[dolo666]

Here is why monopolies are really harmful for business. What if Apple wasn't there for Real to look at for partnership? Monopolies only help deteriorate the creativity and human progress. Foward thinking companies realize that in order to perform excellent corporate execution, symbiotic relationships are not only necessary, they are profitable.

Why are you forgetting?

[Rethcir]

It seems like everyone is overlooking how RealPlayer is one of the most obnoxious programs in the universe. It puts itself all over your computer (system tray, explorer bar, etc), is loaded down with ads and spyware, and so forth. I pretty much refuse to ever support anything involving real, since it's such a crappy crappy suite of programs. I would laud the kind folks at apple (even though I'm a PC user) for making themselves as much of a pain in the ass to Real as they are to their users!

Re:Why are you forgetting?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like everyone is overlooking how RealPlayer is one of the most obnoxious programs in the universe. It puts itself all over your computer (system tray, explorer bar, etc), is loaded down with ads and spyware, and so forth.

On Windows, perhaps. On OS X, RealPlayer is just a lil' app and browser plugin that plays Real-format files. No more, no less.

Funnily enough, even Windows Media Player for OS X is totally ad-free and stripped down. Shame it's got pretty crappy performance.

MSN Messenger for OS X also has an option to turn off the 'Promotional Pane' at the bottom of the contacts list. Not 100% sure why we get special treatment, but OS X users don't seem to get screwed with that kind of commercial invasion.

Interestingly...

[Anonymous Coward]

...RealOne Player 9 for Mac OS X actually includes none of the ads and crap that plague the Windows version. Like, at all. No popups, no shit ads, nothing. Just a player. As it should be.

Re:Interestingly...

[MindStalker]

They did that for realplayer 10 for the PC to, no spyware. Looks like they are changing their tune.

Re:Interestingly...

[Seth Finklestein]

I'll need to see the source code before I'm inclined to believe that.

Sorry. Real lost my trust years ago, and it'll take a tarball of C code to restore it.

Re:Interestingly...

[Seek_1]

..so they're changing their tune, how nice for them. No way will I EVER buy a Real product or support any company that uses Real streaming technology. (btw, am I the only one who fills in every registration form that doesn't require validation with support@real.com?)

Re:Interestingly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if Real have changed their tune...

They held the gun that shot themselves, I won't help apply a tourniquet. Let them die off.

Let Real serve as a warning to whatever company that takes their place.

Re:Interestingly...

[Feral Bueller]

Real lost my trust years ago, and it'll take a tarball of C code to restore it.

Personally I'd settle for being ablt to view Real files using VLC.

Real has completely blown it, and I see no reason to continue trying to keep the patient alive. Let them form an alliance with Microsoft.

The *real* story here (pun intended) is that Apple has a serious threat from Microsoft in both the audio and the video arenas, and their long history of corporate arrogance is doing nothing to help their position. Microsoft is a juggernaut and they're going to come flying into this vertical market the same way that they did when they discovered the INTARWEB.

Apple has survived so far, and I don't see them going away, but I don't see HP-branded iPods flying off of the shelves either.

Like it or not, when Micosoft decides they want market share, they play really nice and warm and fuzzy with everybody until they get their 80% market share. Then they start behaving like pricks. Apple starts out behaving like pricks.

[Disclaimer: this post is being sent from an Aluminum PowerBook G4, lest you think I'm just trolling]

Re:Interestingly...

[AKnightCowboy]

They did that for realplayer 10 for the PC to, no spyware. Looks like they are changing their tune.

When someone comes up and takes a dump on my desk it's very hard for me to take them seriously from that point on. I've very reluctantly gone back to using TurboTax this year, but Real has continually defectated upon not only my desk, but my keyboard, chair, and my new living room carpet. They can suck it.

Re:Interestingly...

[i5ao]

> I don't see HP-branded iPods flying off of the shelves

This is because they haven't begun shipping yet.

Re:Interestingly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah seth I used to respect you, now I see your just a dumbass. Before you make stupid comments, about seeing source code, maybe you should go review the Helix Player, which is source code like you asked.

Re:Interestingly...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't figure out why some GNU distros include real. Mandrake pro, Mepis, Vector... I don't know what they are thinking, but it's a huge turn off. If i wanted that kind of trash i would use MSW.

Re:Interestingly...

[Feral Bueller]

This is because they haven't begun shipping yet.

that was the point.

i5ao, meet sarcasm. Sarcasm, i5ao.

Re:Interestingly...

[UnassumingLocalGuy]

The Linux/Unix version is the same. It's basically RealPlayer G2/8, with updated codecs. No spyware. OTOH, I did hear that it had a few security flaws recently.

Re:Interestingly...

[antic]

My decision to avoid Real came after I noticed that any computer running Real Player was unstable, and all of my machines without it were staying up and happy week after week.

About once, in the last few years, I've really wanted to watch something in the Real format, so I installed the application for about 10 minutes and then got it out of there as quickly as I could.

I'm sure they're trying to get back on track now, but I really don't have much need for their stuff, so best of luck to them.

Re:Interestingly...

[Vincman]

Personally I'd settle for being ablt to view Real files using VLC.

Realplayer and Quicktime files can be viewed on other players using Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative respectively.

Re:Interestingly...

[jcjewell]

I tend to think that it's too little too late. I gave up on RealNetworks long ago because of all of the viruslike behavior and have advised anyone that I come in contact with to just say no to Real content.

High level communication

[BortQ]

I'd think that such a 'strategic alliance' would be discussed in person, or at least over the phone. A single email message doesn't really say commitment.

Hopefully both Apple and Microsoft ignore Real

[Grimster]

Please, let them BOTH ignore Real and let the bastards die the slow agonizing death they so RICHLY deserve.

Has anyone really used their junk since like version 3 or 4 when it became so laden with addons and hidden hitchhikers that no one in their right mind would install their crap?

So hopefully both M$ and Apple will ignore Real networks and then Real will hopefully die soon.

Yeah I know, dream on, but hey, I'm a romantic at heart.

Let Real Die

[Facekhan]

"they are dying."
"Let them die."

I will not miss Real too much and I know very few of us will. They make a buggy crappy player and it competed with another buggy crappy player for a different equally crappy format. The company with the bigger bank account won. No surprise there. I play my .rm files in WMP anyways thanks to the RealAlternative codec.

Apple has nothing to gain by helping Real and it is unlikely that Microsoft wants anything to do with Real except maybe to wait until they are about to collapse and buy them out to own the format.

No one uses Realplayer to play mp3's except for those systems that downloaded the RealOne operating system and can't use anything else to play media files anymore.

Re:Let Real Die

[PMuse]

Spock: "Jim, there is an historic opportunity here."
Kirk: "Don't trust them!"
Spock: "They are dying."
Kirk: "LET them die!"

You know, the moral of that movie was that Kirk was wrong and Spock was right. Hmmmmm.

Re:Let Real Die

[th77]

Damn, you beat me to the ST:VI reference. Anyways, as I posted in a Mac-oriented forum that no one here will really care about...

In Star Trek VI, when the Klingon empire was months from collapse and they came to the Federation to discuss an alliance, Kirk first exclaimed "let them die!" But cooler heads, who saw the potential of such an alliance, prevailed. And the result was a number of intersting Next Generation episodes. Oh, and a better future for both, for example uniting against common enemies like the Romulans and the Borg.

I leave the drawing of screamingly obvious parallals to the reader.

Re:Let Real Die

[Facekhan]

I am well aware of the moral of that movie. Perhaps I should have used a B5 quote instead.

Kosh: "They are a dying people, we should let them pass."

Why would apple do it?

[MrRuslan]

Apple has quick time...altogh to me almost as repulsive as the other "major" but definetly better than real...real is the most annoying thing i have ever seen and its not even a decent product...they have quicktime they dont need real...i think real needs to go home and think over there buisnees practices and products...MPlayer and Xine rock i love them bouth and hope windows users get a decent port one day....

Interesting

[Zebra_X]

As it is now - Real offers the ONLY player that incorporates all major music formats WMA, MPEG, ATRAC3, with exception for Apple's AAC. Real would be in a great position to offer a player that finally brings the whole mess of crap that is DRM under one umbrella and offer a music management platform to rival all others provided of course Jobs goes along with their scheme. So the real question is "Is Job's going to go for it?"

"BUT BITCH, I SAID BIIIITCH, I AIN'T GONNA GO FOR IT, NOT NOW, NOT EVEAH!" - SD

Re:Interesting

[abb3w]

Real would be in a great position to [...] offer a music management platform to rival all others

In a position to do so, yes; would do so, probably not. The problem is their current free player is very hard to find to download, and last I heard their privacy/spam policy sucked-- a flaw with their advertising supported model, or at least its implementation. It's also highly intrusive, insisting on constantly checking and nagging abot updating to newer-but-not-better versions. The last straw for me was when a security exploit was announced in all versions, and you HAD to update to the newest version.... which was NOT readily findable on their website. As I recall, that week you needed to supply a working email address to get to download the current free player.

My reaction was to explain to my boss that I considered this behavior unacceptable when combined with their poor privacy policy, and got the go-ahead to uninstall Real Player from every PC and Mac I support. No-one has missed it.

Re:Interesting

[mbbac]

Real uses AAC.

Re:Interesting

[Zebra_X]

Yes - but not the DRM version, the one that is useable.

Re:Interesting

[kendoka]

Yeah, but that's assuming Real can actually make a decent player, which they can't. Maybe I'm sucking teet with the big guys, but all I need is for iTunes to play WMA and WinMediaPlayer to do AAC and many of us would be set. Actually, FLAC support would be very nice too... Fuck RM, let it die already.

Re:Interesting

[JCholewa]

> As it is now - Real offers the ONLY player that
> incorporates all major music formats WMA, MPEG,
> ATRAC3, with exception for Apple's AAC.

I may be incorrect, but I think that there are more than one such player. MPlayer, an open-source video player that runs on Windows, Linux and other platforms, plays everything in the universe, including the formats you mentioned above. Xine is a similar effort; I don't know if it works in Windows, but it probably has port either here or coming eventually, and it *probably* supports all those codecs. Meanwhile, Media Player Classic, a Windows-only project that uses the superior (well, to WMP7 or WMP8, at least) interface of Windows Media Player 6 but combines it with a load of codecs, may also support all these formats.

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

Re:Interesting

[mbbac]

I'd argue that the non-DRM version has more utility.

is Real still relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not sure if Real is still really relevant in the industry... if apple rejected them, how are they so sure that M$ won't do the same?

So..

[hookedup]

They shed the spy/adware and try to pick a side. Well what if they arent picked up by either apple or MS?

Back to installing crap on peoples computers for dimes?

Not exactly genuine

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Glaser has "no idea" how his proposal was leaked.

There's no way Jobs (or anyone at Apple) is going to respond to such a blatant PR move by a floundering company less than 1/10 its size.

Microsoft has the deep pockets and market power to win with these kinds of strong-arm blackmail tactics, but Real? Come on.

I think it's sad Glaser is doing it this way, because there are good arguments for Apple opening up Fairplay to other music services. But Apple is very secretive about its partnerships and alliances (Apple writes into its contracts with manufacturing outsourcing and component producers that they can't publicly admit to it) and they won't want to be seen as even responding to this kind of public pressure from a piss-ant company like Real.

Re:Not exactly genuine

[IGnatius T Foobar]

There's no way Jobs (or anyone at Apple) is going to respond to such a blatant PR move by a floundering company less than 1/10 its size.

Hey, this is the tech industry!

It's beleaguered company, you insensitive clod!

Re:Not exactly genuine

[rthille]

No no, he was refering to Real when he said 'floundering company', Apple is the 'beleaguered company'.

Apple doesn't flounder, they do really cool shit that not enough people feel is worth paying the premium for.

Real is floundering around looking for a reason anyone would care that they continue to exist.

Imagine that.

[the_twisted_pair]

Sounds more like Real is getting desperate for new marketing opportunities.

Apart from that, given what an invasive mess the Realplayer software is I don't want to imagine what they could do to an iPod...flashing banner ads on the display, anyone?

Re:Really now, why hasn't Real gone out of busines

[austad]

I'm pretty sure that most of their money comes from licensing the RealServer. It's expensive. I needed to purchase a 100 client license at a previous job, and at the time it was around $30k. And, I think we were getting a discount too.

BTW, RealServer sucks. The Windows version was unusable, and the Linux version needed a restart every couple of weeks or so. I put that in cron, and that fixed it, sorta. :)

In any case, their license for the server is expensive. They had the benefit of being one of the first companies to provide a streaming video solution, but now that everyone else offers something better, and doesn't have nearly as shady business practices, they are SOL.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it support Ogg Vor... Oh, sorry! Wrong knee-jerk reaction!

Please Applet, dont do it!

[SurfTheWorld]

Apple has come a *long* way in the past few years against really long odds. The OS X platform has revived interest in the PowerPC platform, and nowadays people with Macs (G5 desktops or G4 laptops) are prevalent. Combine that with Apple's music revolution (online music store) and their iPod and I think it's safe to say that Apple has really pulled itself up out of the dungeon.

Real on the other hand is one of the most misunderstood companies out there. Legitimate on the exterior, Real is all but that at it's core (http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/03/06/real_ reply).

Real is deceptive, not technologically innovative, and unfriendly towards Linux.

Apple partnering with Real would be a horrible position to take.

It took a lot of work to get Darwin and Panther to work. No doubt Apple has *very intelligent* people working for them. Take some of the talent pool, and direct them towards developing a streaming media protocol that leverages existing formats (mpeg for example). Real hasn't done anything quite innovative lately (yes, their protocol was innovative when it came out ?5? years ago).

I have no doubt in my mind that Apple could put together:
a.) a more efficient wire protocol
b.) reach more people than Real
c.) make the interface intuitive and able to be skinned / themed
d.) do this in less time

Real is dying (search /. for Real and you'll find posts about MLB suing them and radio stations considering ditching them in favor of media player). Apple hitching their wagon to Real is flat out dumb.

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Real is ... unfriendly towards Linux.

Linux is the primary platform for RealServer. They sell more Linux servers than any other platform. The server developers use Linux as their primary platform. I don't see how that is "unfriendly" towards Linux. Perhaps you meant the consumer division which makes the player, but that is simply because the Linux market share is too low to warrant spending money on developing the Linux player.

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[SurfTheWorld]

Just because the server works under Linux does not mean that the company mentality has been one that is favorable to Linux users. There are microsoft plugins for Apache that allow FrontPage to publish content - does that mean that Microsoft is friendly towards Linux?

There are projects out there that are agnostic towards operating systems. Apache httpd, Gaim, WebLogic, Firefox, and Python are examples of this. Each project has downloads for many different operating systems, and beyond that, the mailing lists are amicable to users posting questions related to platform X. It's not: "Here's the .exe install for our program. Use it and you are on your own." That's the impression I receive when I go to real.com -

For a long time it was difficult to find the Linux version of the real player. When you did find it, it was statically linked for the longest time (only recently have they started rpm'ing it). And it's rarely updated. A month or so ago I spent 15 minutes looking through their site before finding the Linux Real player. After finding it, downloading it, and installing it I found out that it was the same version I installed almost 2 years ago!

I *know* the Windows client has changed in the last 2 years. Why hasn't the Linux client? Because Real doesn't care about Linux! You're accurate in saying that Real doesn't have a customer base in Linux that warrants further development, and that to me is the definition of "Linux unfriendly."

How many people that use Gaim do so under Windows? I think me and my buddy Chris are the only ones. How many people install Apache httpd under Windows? Maybe a dozen. But the projects still ship binaries for Windows. And the mailing lists are still responsive to Windows users. That's "Windows friendly" - why can't Real be "Linux friendly"?

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

"nowadays people with Macs (G5 desktops or G4 laptops) are prevalent"

I'm a new Mac owner, and I've got to heartedly disagree with that statement. It's a good system, but you certainly will find more PCs in actual use than Macs. I'm sure the numbers vouch for this.

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple hitching their wagon to Real is flat out dumb.

Call us when you've run a multi-national company. Then we'll give a shit what you think about what Apple should do.

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[SurfTheWorld]

Would you agree that they are more common now than 5 years ago? That's the point I was trying to make.

5 years ago I can't recall seeing anybody with a mac laptop. Now I know 3 different people with them that love them. They previously hated Apple. What a turnaround....

Re:Please Applet, dont do it!

[SurfTheWorld]

Wow, a "multi-national" company, eh? That sounds pretty impressive.

If someone in Europe uses my open source software, does that mean I'm multi-national too?

What about if I am a consultant and somebody in Japan sends me an email with a question - am I then qualified to state an opinion on what Apple should do?

A Bit Overstated, Don't You Think?

[bfg9000]

Real Begs Apple for Alliance

Begging? The tone of the article doesn't show any "begging". But it's nice the poster wants to give us some drama here on Slashdot while painting Real as weak and pitiful and Apple as mighty and in control of the whole game. "Oooh! DRAMA!!! Watch out Redmond Bill! Cupertino Steve and the Glaser might make an Alliance to vote you off!"

Not very realistic or honest wording. Not that I like Real, I don't care. But why the insults?

I don't get it.

[microcars]

Why would Glaser attempt negotiations via an email and a "leaked" version of the email?

Does he think that he will "win" either way?

Apple and REAL apparently tried some sort of an agreement a couple of years ago, but it fell through because REAL wanted access to all Apple's QT code, but would not give up any of the REALplayer code to Apple.

It appears he is just looking for ANY publicity at all for REAL.

But of course, there is no such thing as "bad" publicity!

Re:I don't get it.

[drunkenbatman]

Why would Glaser attempt negotiations via an email and a "leaked" version of the email?

These types of things are generally done for a few reasons:

1. One hell of a cheap press release. I mean, we're talking about it right? People aren't talking about real that much anymore, except in certain niche's (they do have good 'live' stream-creation tools). Analysts & others are going to comment on it, and to comment on it are going to have to investigate where/how it might sense or not, and hence, attention.

2. They may well want to put some outside pressure on Apple. Apple can tell the shareholders/board that they were approached, but that they dont think it is in Apple's interest, but if enough analysts latch onto the idea, and then influence shareholders enough... you never know. Or, I wouldn't be surprised if they've had talks with MS, and are just 'floating the deal' to see what comes up or

3. There's a reason why Apple never comments about linux on the desktop. Mindshare. They like people talking about Apple/Microsoft. They don't want a situation where people are talking Linux/Microsoft, and Apple isn't mentioned. Real is becoming somewhat marginalized outside of the streaming niche as a general player, and, theoretically, this has people associating them as being one of the three major players in the market, not just iTunes vs WMP, but rather iTunes vs WMP vs Real.

4. Ever seen what any sort of rumors about partnerships/acquisitions/anything can do to a stock price?

Who, in their right mind, would team up w/ Real?

[DroopyStonx]

Why would anyone want to team up with Real? Their player sucks, the format, which boasts crystal clear quality audio and vido, comes nothing close to something like Quicktime. If anything, they're the bottom rung of digital media companies. Why would the big wigs want to team up with someone so small and insignificant?

Do they even make a profit from anything OTHER than Ad revenue? Both Apple AND MS should give them a big, "Go away," so we can be done with them once and for all. They're struggling here.

Wonderful Idea for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of all the developement that is going on with helix for linux. This might allow me to listen to all my drm'd aac's on my linux system rather then having to reboot to windows and having to deal with windows for as long as i want to listen to my music.

Re:Apple aligning with Real…

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is: One is speculative, the other has already occurred.

What about Apple and Microsoft?

[enosys]

What about Apple and Microsoft? Apple produces software that runs on Windows and Microsoft produces stuff for the Mac. You can play Apple's DRMed tracks in Windows and Microsoft's in MacOS. Does that seem wrong to you?

Re:What about Apple and Microsoft?

[lamz]

Real is a lot more annoying than Microsoft.

Oh god, please no!

[Monoman]

Real is one of the worst things to install on a Windows machine. I only do it when needed and then uninstall it but friends and relatives I support don't know any better.

You should add...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that you can still "burn" DVDs with ANY DVD recorder you get; you just can't do it with iDVD with any burner.

Re:You should add...

[aristotle-dude]

That's not true. There is a hack for iDVD which let's you use it with any external or internal DVD burner. Actually, it's just a set of special resource files that you put in your home directory. PatchburnII takes care of the rest of the iApps by writing the driver for you. If you install a third-party supplied Pioneer A04 internally, you can burn directly from all of the iApps without any additional drivers/hacks.

I WAS thinking this was a good idea

[Dixie_Flatline]

I initially thought this was a good idea. Real gets a lot of credibility, and Apple gets someone else to sell songs for their iPod.

Then I started to think about the competing stores. It doesn't really do either of them any good to be selling the same songs, usually at the same price. I suppose it DOES give incentive to each of them to differentiate from the other store, but that's on TOP of the work that they have to do to offer more than the stores that use WMA.

I think Real's best proposition would be to somehow license the iTunes music store. Rather than set up a whole store on their own which is a huge waste of money - and arguably unsustanable - they could make it so it's possible to buy from the iTMS through their player. Steve would have to hand down some strict interface guidelines, but suddenly the Real player would have a lot of ACTUAL value added. Starting up their own store kind of looks like value added, but it's really just a gimmick when it's so hard to make money, do it properly, sell good music, etc.

Re:I WAS thinking this was a good idea

[CdBee]

I like what you suggest, despite my dislike of Real

I can add another justification as well: iTunes requires Mac OS or Windows 2000/XP/2003. Realplayer runs on Windows 98/ME, so this could be seen as an extension of the market.

Incidentally, I recall an announcement of cross-integration of codecs between Realplayer and Quicktime, which never came about, although I do not know why. Perhaps with this evidence of a falling-out between Apple and Real in the past an alliance is less than likely.

Question: Should Apple buy RealNetworks?

Re:I WAS thinking this was a good idea

[tbone1]

Question: Should Apple buy RealNetworks?

Not if the price is more than a bullet's.

iPods

[ThatGuyInTheHole]

If the iTMS is all about selling iPods, why should Apple turn this down? This owuld be a huge boon to Real, but it'd help Apple as well. Steve Jobs' ignoring this is not going to make microsoft go away, and the more allies he recruits to the AAC/Playfair side, the more iPods he will sell. TGITH

Look to microsoft...

[jwthompson2]

and if they look to microsoft and microsoft turns them down then Real is dead and may actually go away...sounds like a good thing to me...

Well...

[MrNonchalant]

This sums up why apple should just say "no."

this is so silly

[Glog]

What makes him think Microsoft wants to do business with Real? Didn't Real just go behind Microsoft's back to ask the EU to have their player pre-installed in PCs sold in Europe? Correct me if I am wrong but Microsoft would rather let Real squirm than do business with them.

Real switching to WMA compatibility?

[artemis67]

Maybe I'm missing something, but if Real switches over to WMA, then why even bother with RealPlayer?

At first, I thought an Apple/Real alliance might be a good thing. After all, it's well known that iTMS is a loss-leader for Apple, so why not let Real have a share of the red ink?

However, if Real is trying to form an alliance, it can only mean that they believe that they are in trouble. In that case, having no alliance would mean that the market would only shake out Real that much more quickly, leaving Apple and Microsoft as the sole competitors.

Still, Apple is not good at forming strategic alliances. They always underestimate Microsoft. Always. An alliance with Real might slow Real's departure, but it also might slow Microsoft's advance, and for that reason should be seriously considered.

But here we have Glasser insulting Jobs in the press. Gee, when was the last time YOU were won over by public insults.

So yeah, Jobs should probably accept, but he's not gonna, because he's got too much pride.

Glaser's previous comments about Apple

[Infonaut]

April, 2004
"... dismissing Apple's iTunes service, he points to Real's Rhapsody music service with 1.3m subscribers - which 'in the United States is number one'."

July 2003
"It's hard to design a better scenario for us than what Apple did. Apple serves only 5 percent of the market, and it doesn't offer an all-you-can-eat service, just downloads. One of our challenges is teaching consumers about digital music. It's great having Steve Jobs get the word out, since we have the best service for the 95 percent of people who don't use a Mac."

September 2001
"One of [the] surest ways you could drive Bill nuts was to say that Apple is the company that innovates, and Microsoft is the company that iterates. But I think it's basically true. My goal was to create a company culture that has the same pioneering, innovative spirit that one associates with Apple and that has the persistence, a willingness to go nose to the grindstone, that one associates classically [with] Japanese manufacturing companies, like Matsushita, and with Microsoft."

Now, to put the current Real/Apple relationship in perspective, take a look at this May, 2001 tidbit:

"Today, Glaser's RealNetworks, with 26 million users, beats out both Microsoft's and Apple's offerings. Apple, which has slipped to No. 3 behind Microsoft, continues to lose ground. In January, the number of QuickTime users fell to 7.29 million, down 8.4% from a year earlier, according to a recent survey by market researcher Jupiter Media Matrix. Windows Media Player had 21.5 million users, according to the same study."

Sounds like Glaser is trying really hard to make his position look solid, but he sees the writing on the wall. Consumers are fed up with Real's "hunt for the free download" tactics, and aren't taking to Real 10 the way he'd hoped.

Re:Glaser's previous comments about Apple

[X_Bones]

What is your point exactly? All I see is two quotes on music services (neither of which indicate that Real is in trouble), one on the popularity of media players dated three years ago, and one which has nothing to do with anything. Your conclusion can't be drawn from the evidence provided, and you didn't back up your statement at all about paid vs. free versions of RealPlayer (not that it makes much sense in the context of the rest of your post). Hell, anyone can google for "Glaser + Apple" and get a bunch of news articles, but you actually have to do some reading if you're trying to convince anyone that Real, with their million-plus subscribers, is really in as much trouble as you seem to think.

Re:Glaser's previous comments about Apple

[Infonaut]

The point was primarily to provide background for Glaser's current plea to Apple. My note about Real being in trouble was not really supported by the quotes, as you point out. But the real aim of my post was to put Glaser's position now in context.

What I find interesting about tech reporting in general is that most articles fail to show how the current story relates to what has come before. Anyone can go to Google to find quotes from Glaser; you're right. Is it ok with you that I did?

Share the Wealth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh,
I get it - Real sees Apple making Real Profits with it's Macs, iPods and iTunes, and Real wants a cut of the action?

Funny this begging comes out of Real when Apple makes public just how much 'phat loot' they are pulling from the iPod / iTunes system.

I don't think Apple should share the wealth...

I look forward to the iMovie Player and to downloading videos from iTunes over high speed broadband.

It's not about codec technology anymore...

[lpangelrob2]

As enough people have already stated, Real hasn't really done anything for me in terms of codecs and technology in about, say, five years. Since people can't seem to get off the subject, though, they should probably know that Real has become a content company, which, since I'm rarely utilizing the full bandwidth of my broadband at home, is Not That Bad an Idea. Really. Yes, content providing costs money, deal with it.

So they want Fairplay? Apple should ask Real to provide that broadband content. No specifics, but I'll bet that people that own Apples tend to have broadband easily accessible. Apple can choose to pass on the content in their Quicktime channels for free, or bundle some with their .Mac service (hey, maybe I'd even consider getting it if I did that.)

It would definitely make for an interesting combination.

The desperate actions of a desperate company

[fzammett]

That's all this is. Real has been slowly pissing off whatever customers it ever had by it's borderline spyware coding practices, and then not even giving better performance than the competition (not consistently and not by any appreciable amounts anyway).

QuickTime is far superior. Hell, even WindowsMedia is superior. Real knows their only real hope (pun intended!) is to hitch their wagon to a winning team and ride those coattails until the cows come home.

I personally hope Apple bitch-slaps them back to their hole in the wall, and I hope Microsoft just outright buys them to shut them up (in this singular case I'd be all for that tactic from MS!).

Real just annoys me to no end, and their demise, bu whatever means, can't come soon enough for me.

*

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Yeah Ogg

[Anonymous Coward]

They made a huge impact. If it wasn't for them I bet real woudl own the world right now.

fucktard

Re:Yeah Ogg

[Anonymous Coward]

no computer time until you finish shaving your mom's back.

Re:I've been missing Real for quite a while

[Bastian]

I won't use RealPlayer on my computer, but I wish I could. Sure, they were evil and ran a closed codec and all that, but one thing they were was a competitor in the media codec market that wasn't bound to any one platform. This was good in its own right, but also created some room for other competitors to try and get into the market - Ogg, for example.

Now that Real is basically irrelevant, we have Quicktime/AAC and Windows Media. Both are a pain in the ass if you don't run Windows or MacOS, what with the reverse engineering and all. And I really worry that with the vast majority of the world getting Quicktime, iTunes and WMP for free with their browsers, Ogg may start to lose whatever market share it has, esp. since at present there isn't much long-term incentive for making each company's pet media players play Ogg files.

Real with microsoft?

[abionnnn]

They must have entered the complex plane ... they'd have to be imagining if they think microsoft would help them. =)

About that plethora of popups...

[Onan The Librarian]

As I read these screeds about Real's popup-mania I'm wondering, "What OS/browser are they using ?" I use the RealPlayer daily, have zero popups along with it, and enjoy it immensely. OTOH, I'm running Linux and Mozilla, no popups or other adcrap/spycrap here... yet...

And people, please: Apple is as hostile to open-source as Microsoft, they just peddle themselves differently. Historically Apple has *always* been hostile to openness.

Real missed the portable opportunity

[ravi_n]

Much as I've appreciated Real's Linux players over the years the reality is that Real has been mismanaged for a long time. Real has had Linux/Unix players for bog years. If they had invested the effort and energy to take those players and partner with an embedded Linux company (MontaVista, etc.) they could have been out in front with a low-cost media platform for portable devices *long* before anyone else... they could have at least been the player software behind most iPod "clones" if not having gotten lucky and have had one of their licensees outdo Apple.

But they focused on streaming for too long and their first major step into the portable world was with cell phone media players late in the game... and the rest will soon be history.

Please no!

[xmorg]

We cannot let Real go the way of Bungie!
Please, Steve Jobs help them out and I will think about buying a Ipod :)

Re:Please no!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Real sucks. The sooner they are out of business the better.

2) MS aquairing Bungie was the best thing that could have happened to them.

Go ahead and let Real align with M$

[Anonymous Coward]

As a potential customer the last thing I want is Real to pollute and dirty Apple's business model. I don't want anything to do with Real. I don't want them on my Ipod, I don't want to find them in Itunes. Go ahead and let Real make their alliance with M$. Can you imagine how horrible the MS suite would be with all the Real spyware zapping away your system memory?
----
That boy is about as sharp as a sack full of wet mice.

Real needs to die.

[otis wildflower]

Real's server model is crap (authentication is a nightmare). Its proprietary codecs aren't good enough to be worth the trouble. Its content isn't worth the trouble to register (and payf for). Helix is kinda useless compared to mplayer, xine, etc. (its browser plugin is useless in konq)

Darwin/Quicktime Streaming Server is a better streaming server solution, and it's free.

Apple partnering with Real? Why? Apple should only partner with Real if they drop Real and go with Quicktime. And at that point, why should Real even exist?

Frankly, WMP is better supported on my platform (Linux KDE/KMplayer/Konq) than Real (the KMplayer kpart bones javascript tests for rm plugins), so what's the point of Real?

Add in the asinine hiding of the free player, and the verdict is:

Death by irrelevance.

Re:Real needs to die.

[Anonymous Coward]

WMP is only better supported providing there's no DRM involved. Currently there is no way Linux can use locked content WMP files because it playback is nothing more than a hack.

Unless microsoft released their player for Linux, we Linux users will soon be locked out of protected content.

At least the Linux realplayer allows us to get at such media, not so wmp :(

the codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

Morpheus: BUFFERING...and turn a human being into this. (Morpheus holds up a titty that produces money labeled "consumer")

BUFFERING....

Neo looks down and sees a black cat and then BUFFERING.... BUFFERING... he sees it again.

Neo: deja vu

*Trinity and Morpheus turn around quick, the fast movement of their heads producing a blurred mass of pixels*

Trinty: WHAT DID you say? (audio volume goes from high down to low half volume tin-can resonance for some unknown reason)

Neo: I said... BUFFERING... *screp* *scraaW* ....BUFFERING....

Trinity: *screp* *sreeep*.... BUFFERING....a glitch in the codec

FIVE MINUTE WAIT, 86% LOADED.

Cut to an action scene in slow-mo lots of trails and effects behind the bullets. But it's slow mo in the part where Agent Real comes from hiding behind the grocery bag and shoots at neo.... the part that wasn't slow-mo in the cinema. Directors cut maybe... BUFFERING.....

POPUP - WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY REALPLAYER GOLD!

BUFFERING..70% RELOADED...

Neo: but I thought I uninstalled you.

Agent Real: I knew I was supposed to follow orders and remove my files and registry entries but ..BUFFERING.. I didn't. I chose not to. ...BUFFERING...

bakcwards???

[BigBir3d]

Shouldn't it be Apple asking people if their iPod could play other people prop. formats?

Is Real that bad off now?

Go do whatever you like...

[The Fanta Menace]

...cos I'm just going to keep using ogg vorbis and mp3 files ripped from CD.

Your DRM encumbered, proprietary malware is redundant.

+1 fuckin funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Like some guy said a while ago, WE MUST PRINT T-SHIRTS!

if I know Jobs...

[Sophrosyne]

...which I don't... I'd guess he's the type of person that would be much happier to see Real go out of business, or become affiliated with Microsoft and watch their company pushed into obscurity as Microsoft focuses on their next big thing.
Why should Jobs care about Real? If he wanted to make an impact he'd buy Real at a bargain price and switch everything over to Quicktime. Real is scrambling to stay relevant, so sad, but Real has been it's own worst enemy for years.

corporate soul

[gumpish]

Did they sell their corporate soul to Satan?

Isn't "coporate soul" a contradiction in terms?

Re:corporate soul

[tbone1]

Isn't "coporate soul" a contradiction in terms?

Yes, they have to sell them to pay toff the IRS. (Sorry, but April 15 always puts me in this mood.)

Coming soon to a web store near you...

[suman28]

Now with Real Apples and improved taste. (Only 10% actual content). * Based on a 2000 song diet.

Be careful for what you wish for

[bogie]

So Real dies, but then what about Linux users? Real was the only reason Linux users were able to stream from a huge amount of popular web sites. Yes I know after RP8 they just left us hanging for a while but at least the product still worked. Shit something is better than nothing. Real dying may be for the greater good but it would definitely hurt linux users. Mplayer and hacked codecs don't exactly work well on every website out there and I refuse to pay for the crossover plugin. So I ask again, what will Linux users do? Especially when web streaming becomes a DRM'd Windows Media only affair?

Realplayer in linux

[Britz]

Realplayer in Linux sucks big time.

Maybe there is no reason to offer a commercial streaming media player in Linux, but they have a download for an rpm or tar.gz of some Realplayer 8. There is also a Debian package that can install the rpm. But in 1 out of 3 cases the player just crashes on startup! Other than that even though I have the plugin in my browser it won't play the streams. And mplayer now plays downloaded real media files if you downlad the codec from the mplayer website. So it is completely useless, even without the spy + adware it carries on Windows.

Nowdays there is a streaming solution for Windows Media Player. There might be a reason why the people adopt that one for their content instead of the Real solution. It might just be that the client really, really, sucks big time!

If Real would make a client that actually does what it should (not crash, play streams) at least decently.

There is no competition it seems. No competition leads to crappy products. See Microsoft for that one.

Re:Realplayer in linux

[Random BedHead Ed]

There is a better version. Look around for the Helix Player. It's a free community-developed version of RealPlayer that is meant to be to RP what Mozilla is to Netscape, or what OpenOffice.org is to Star Office.

I've had good luck with it. It plays real video and audio streams quite well. And like the latest Real Player software there is no annoying spyware or ads.

I agree with you about the Linux Real Player 8 - it really sucked. But fortunately there's a good upgrade path.

Re:Realplayer in linux

[mahbidness]

This website states that helix player is developed "sponsored by or in association with Real", so it seems like Real is at the very least passively supporting a linux distro. The review also states that while "the standalone Helix Player started on my system and played all of the RealMedia files I could throw at it", it still has some issues with integration with Firefox.

Re:Realplayer in linux

[vikman]

HelixPlayer project is one of the key projects of HelixCommunity, the effort by Real to opensource many of the core technologies that drive it's software.
The Helix DNA Client mediaengine for instance is the same mediaengine that drives the new RealPlayer10 for windows, the upcoming RealPlayers for both Linux and Mac. HelixPlayer is the basis for the future RealPlayer for Linux.
Hope that clarifies things.
-V

So far so good with the....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharp Zaurus SL-C760..

you should see the response. NO LIE, a girl actually RUBBED against me saying it looks sexy...

sure she was nuts. So?

that thing has major bling!

Re:I've been missing Real for quite a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg may start to lose whatever market share it has.

Ogg? Market share? What market share?

Not Invented Here...

[simpl3x]

It's not that Apple/Steve is quaking in fear, nor should it. It will likely be a two company game when Real bites the dust, or basically becomes a MS serf. But, there are some legitimate concerns. Why doesn't Apple make QuickTime more open, and players for all platforms including mobiles? Why isn't there a software iTunes for most of the platforms, mobiles included? Why can't companies come to Apple to license the technology and use the store to their advantage, ala Amazon links?

Steve does need to get a grip sometimes, and become more open. I'm not sure Real is that special company upon which to bet however. But Real aside, the concerns are the same.

Re:Not Invented Here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because mobiles already have their own codecs.

In fact, just recently, Apple had released these same codecs to Quicktime to be able to play these files -- as well as author them (I believe you have to have both the $25 Quicktime Pro license AND the MP4 authoring license to do this though).

Re:Not Invented Here...

[ciroknight]

Truthfully, your idea of iTunes Mobile is a HUGE possibility, but the question is, do you really want Microsoft Windows Media Player Mobile? Do you even want to say that, it takes forever to type... anyways, the more Apple monopolizes the market, the more Microsoft will see itself as losing, and will attepmt to move in and conquer. They're actually being really passive right now in not releasing their own brand media player *which, in a way I feel is what the DellPod was*.

But it would be neat to have the ability to play my iTunes music on my mobile phone, the only reason past the above I can think of them not wanting to would be the fact they're trying to sell iPods....... But it's still a novel idea.

Re:Not Invented Here...

[Pantheraleo2k3]

Pocket Windows Media Player is included with

Pocket PC 2000
Pocket PC 2002
Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC.

So it already exists.

And I'd love an iTunes for the Palm OS

Hard to ignore video market.

[MisterSquid]

I agree that Real makes a terrible product and has despicable business practice. But the curious thing is that so many Internet companies who stream or provide video files do so for Real Player and/or Windows Media Player. Often, such sites will offer files viewable only with Real Player.

From everything I can see, Real has a sizeable share of the Internet video market.

Prospective Female?

[The Placid Casual]

Prospective? Not currently a female?

Each to their own I guess... ;)

Come on, be a pal

[paranoic]

that should be

Come on, be an ipal

But...

[mog007]

I thought the major advantage to having a hard drive in the iPod, aside from massive space, was so you would decrease the

access tim

èjfoejn

"Apple respects the consumer"

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, you have never tried to play a movie in Quicktime. I got used to the windows version having a pop-up "Go pro!" dialog box when you started, but I never expected the Mac version to have one too, especially since I PAID THEM FOR THE HARDWARE AND THE OS ALREADY! Apple should take a lesson from Microsoft, who doesn't have an annoying pop up when you start Windows Media Player! (which is the only good thing about WMP, but that's not the point)

The real solution for Real...

[mbbac]

The real solution for Real is to concentrate on DRM-less music downloads. Enlist enlightened independent musicians and enlightened labels (if there are any). That way their songs (which are already encoded in AAC) will easily interoperate with iPods and any other software or hardware that supports AAC.

AirAmerica

[bstadil]

I agree I hate Real with a passion. Make MS look good. Anyone by the way know how to get AirAmericato play with Mplayer. It worked the first few days but now they have changed it and I flat out refuse to install Real's Spy / Spam ware

Re:AirAmerica

[Hassman]

Email them! I have. The best way to get things to change is to take an active role and tell them what you would like to see.

Workaround for QT nag was[Re:High Level of Fear?]

[justMichael]

Set your date way into the future, you'll need to disable NTP, change date, launch QT, quit QT, tell it to nag you later, enable NTP.

The next time you see that nag should be the day after the date you set your date to in the future.

If I were Steve Jobs ...

[SengirV]

I would tell Glaser to Pound Sand.

You insensitive clod...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a prospective female who knows what buffering is AND is impressed by geeks. However, I'd be much more impressed by a home made mp3 player or one that's been modified to do other stuff (I used to have a mobilon 4500 that doubled as a taser)

Re:You insensitive clod...

[DoomHaven]

Er... so you are a man that is likely to become or be a female who knows what buffering is AND is impressed by geeks?

I think the original point was that the woman in the example was not a prospective "woman" (because she already *is* a woman) but a prospective *girlfriend*.

youngin'

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever happened to wave and midi?

Positive Move

[Timothy Dang]

I for one think this is a wonderful move...(buffering)...and would like to see...(buffering)...and Microsoft would likely...(buffering)...very much.

I say go for it

[iamacat]

Apple needs some new 3rd party support, with Microsoft, Adobe, Palm and many smaller companies dropping Mac versions of their product. On their home turf, under MacOSX, iTunes is well entrenched and they have nothing to fear from Real. Just look at Windows/WMP, and it is a lesser product.

On Windows, iPod users new to digital music will just install whatever is on the CD. On the other hand, a huge number of users already installed real player to watch some video from a web site. Also, it's a popular format for Chinese audio books and movies, I guess because it's easy/quick to make a small file that doesn't suck that badly. If they start to promote iPod with flashing tray icons and the biggest clickable icon on their home page ("download RealPlayer Plus with iPod mini for just $249, get 100 free songs") users who are already into this kind of stuff just might bulge.

female != !geek

[sulli]

my sweetie has more geek toys than I do! (and hacker tools that I can't possibly figure out.)

then again, she's the one who portscanned me before we met. hee!

Re:female != !geek

[kinzillah]

Careful! She's WATCHING YOU! hehehehehe :)

Birds of a feather

[Flentil]

Qucktime and Realplayer are so similar it doesn't surpise me. They both try to hide their free versions, both do anything they can to try to stop you from saving a file to disk so you can see it without the stutter of streaming. Both do thier best to try to spam you with ads and restrict you from resizing or making it full screen. They both excel at annoying and sucking, so they might as well form an alliance of suckitude.

DVD burner for you

[Tibor the Hun]

here ya go:
http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview .asp? DEPA=1&item=27-129-138

A less-annoying RealOne player

[Ineffable 27]

BBC insisted that Real provide a version of their player that doesn't invade their listeners' privacy. You can download it here. I haven't used it myself, but I understand that it lacks the annoyances that folks are complaining about here (eg. pop-ups, spyware).

Re:A less-annoying RealOne player

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC player isn't any different. RealPlayer10 has definitely improved by way of user experience - try it to believe it.

Apple Won't Do A Deal

[Spencerian]

Real has two products that compete with Apple's offerings:

- QuickTime Player's streaming vs. RealPlayer
- QuickTime Streaming Studio vs. Real Server

The advantage Apple has with QTSS is that it's free and usable on many operating systems.

Real offers no significant advantages in an allance, and, particularly, might not provide any changes in Apple's hardware sales (where their cash comes from).

Apple would sooner buy out Real than ally with it.

It's too little, too late.

[Denyer]

Real have already hurt websites which provide content in their format. I'm seeing a lot more sites provide material in multiple formats these days.

iDVD with third-party burners

[rjung2k]

I'm not entirely sure, but I know iDVD 4 will let you run it from a Mac that doesn't have a Superdrive installed, and "archive" a DVD project for transport to a different computer. Can you archive an iDVD project, then burn it to a DVD using something like Toast?

Re:iDVD with third-party burners

[mlrtime]

idvd will not output to a dvd iso, only a idvd project file, so if you don't have another mac you are SOL.

Yup. And then it gets modded up.

[Anonymous Coward]

And then the crackhead Mods wonder why people Troll. Morons.

Backwards

[loftis]

What is what Real really wants is not to be a peer, but rather to start being a content-pimp for Apple.

Take MLB's deal. Change the file format away from a Real format to an Apple controlled format, and then let Real be the content producer, and streamer.

I don't see this as compromising Apple's business, or really, Real's core business, but it does align the two players in a way that puts them against the MS juggernaut.

Real has credibility with content producers, NPR, MLB, etc., and the saavy to make deals with advertisers, etc. Apple has the platform for viewing/listening. I think there is a definite confluence of interest, as long a Apple maintains control of the desktop player component (and by extention iPod).

Want a tarball? Here is a tarball

[green_crocadilian]

Real Helix nightly builds 'n tarballs goodness/
It looks like this will be RealPlayer 11. I am not sure how usable the code is at the moment though...

Re:Want a tarball? Here is a tarball

[vikman]

The HelixPlayer nightlies now are pretty stable. MS 2.2 is impending as well.

Firewire camcorders work fine with iSight

[DavidinAla]

I can't speak to the issue of USB video cameras, but my Canon DV camcorder works fine as a camera for iSight. I just plugged it in and it worked with no configuration. I don't see how that keeps iChat from working with anything except iSight.

why FairPlay is closed...

[SethJohnson]

My dad asked me the other day why his TiVo can't play his AAC files like it does his mp3s. I thought about it for a few moments, and gave him the technical reason. But then I thought about the big picture reason-- Apple doesn't license AAC to TiVO because keeping it to themselves leaves the door open for them to create a home-media-option like appliance in the future. I think this strategy probably applies to every other opportunity where people want to license AAC...

Haven't noticed anyone mention, but there's no discussion here of Real opening up their own crap codecs for Apple to use in iTunes...

Later, it becomes...

[feloneous cat]

(Geek to wife)

Honey, come take a look at this....

(Wife to geek)

Do I have to?

RealNetworkss subscription numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Press release just released

450 000 subscribers, up 100 000 from previous q. The 10 consecutive month w. growth. RealNetworks still delivers a lot of contents, and Apple would be incredible stupid to ignore it.

RealPlayer 10 Rocks my face off

[tommyServ0]

Okay, many people out there hate Real for their past. I've been using Real since back in the day, too, and have had the same complaints. But, I have been using RealPlayer 10 (the latest update to RealOne player) and I will say it leaves little left to complain about.

First, the annoying Adware defaults to off, except for alerts relating to software updates. You can shut those off, too (you couldn't in the past) simply by clicking on the "View Real Message Center" icon, then click on "Options -> Customize Message Center" and uncheck Software Updates, then click Save Changes. No more popups.

And if you're really paranoid (I am) you can go to Tools->Preferences, then navigate to Connection->Internet/Privacy and uncheck all the privacy settings. You're anonymous.

What do you have left? A great player that can play anything except Ogg Vorbis (which pains me, believe me). But it plays iTunes AAC files, MPEG4, MP3, AVI, QuickTime, DVDs, CDs, RealAudio/Video, WAV, Windows Media, AIFF, and more.

I bought 7 songs from Real's music store this week and I couldn't be happier. The downloads were fast, the quality incredible (192 Kbps AAC files compared with iTune's 128 Kbps AAC files and Napster's 128 Kbps WMA files) and has the best, most liberal license for its users IMHO.

I've also heard people say that Real is Linux-Unfriendly. WHA? It's the only company that makes a Linux client. There is no Windows Media Player or iTunes for Linux, but there is a RealPlayer for Linux. In fact, it allows you to play your Apple iTunes music on your Linux box. I think that's very Linux-friendly.

Happy Real Customer tryin' to keep it real....

Re:RealPlayer 10 Rocks my face off

[acolwell]

You can get Vorbis and Theora plugins for RealPlayer 10 from the Helix Xiph project. These are alpha quality plugins and work pretty well. If you find any bugs with the plugins you can submit them to the bug tracker and I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible. Aaron

WLS AM 50,000 watt blowtorch

[Anonymous Coward]

has gone to multiple streams. It has the execrable realplayer but also an MP3 stream. The MP3 stream works very well, it would make a great /. story.

Glaser burned Microsoft before

[Tweester]

Methinks the threat to turn to Microsoft might be a bit empty. IIRC the last time that he dealt with Microsoft, he licensed them V4 of the player about a week prior to releasing V5 with protocol updates that made V4 nearly obsolete. Pissed them off pretty good.

Slightly OT:High Level of Fear?

[Ahaldra]

complete lack of adware and spyware on the Mac OS platform.

Not true. Truth is the people using MacOS know very little about their spyware/home-phoning applications. The situation might not be as bad (intrusive, abusing, whatever) as with windows, but that does not mean they do not exist.
Stuffit Expander from Aladdin Systems comes to mind. MS Office too. Photoshop.
Install Little Snitch and have a look for yourself.

Re:Slightly OT:High Level of Fear?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you agree to the End-User Licence Agreement for those commercial products, you acknowledge that the software's author has the right to confirm that you are using the product legitimately. You have no right to use Photoshop without having paid $700 (or $50 if you're a student) for it, and you have no right to use MS Office if you haven't paid $500 (or $10 if you're a student).

Honestly, you PC users are terrible. All you ever do is pirate software and think you have a right to do so.

Either that...

[multiOSfreak]

Or just snag a serial number off the net.

Someone Tell Real..

[jegg]

Apple's FairPlay DRM is already cracked! Why strike a deal for an impotent solution?

Steve's Title is Missing

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

CEO of Real Networks Rob Glaser has emailed Steve Jobs

Seems like Steve Jobs doesn't need the prefix `CEO of Apple and Pixar' ... ;-)

Re:High Level of Fear? - correction

[mydigitalself]

that should be free OR commercial, sorry.

iPod as the music player of choice

[phatsharpie]

Real states that for allowing them to license FairPlay, they'll make iPod their player of choice. But, if they start selling FairPlay DRM'ed AAC files, how can they not? This doesn't seem like that much of an incentive to me. After all, iPod is the ONLY player on the market that works with FairPlay DRM.

I am now wondering if Real wants Apple to do more than just licensing FairPlay to them, i.e. allowing them to sub-licensing it to 3rd party hardware vendors so that other players on the market can also play their files. If that's the case, there is no way in hell Apple would do so, since that would cut into their iPod sales.

-B

Brand and Quality.

[kiwioddBall]

Steve Jobs certainly would not want to associate Apple with the bloated software that Real produces. Apple associated itself with Musicmatch, and I absolutely hate the fact that Musicmatch goes and puts adverts for itself in the music libraries, and they transferred across to the iPod. Apple saved me from that by releasing iTunes.

Hopefully Mr. Jobs will just ignore Mr. Glasers desperately selfish attempts to save his own company. Apple nearly went broke when they licensed their technology last time, Apples strategy now is clearly to control their own product and production from end to end. I hope they succeed. I like quality.

When Apple want to open up their technology to other Music stores, they'll simply enable WMA on the device. Problem solved.

Re:Workaround for QT nag was[Re:High Level of Fear

[CinqDemi]

FYI: that trick works great for Windows 2000 too ( Win 2000 SP4 and QT 6.5 )- thanks

Dear Steve...

[inteller]

Please let my ineffective company leech off your genius or I'll be forced to become your ineffective competitor. Hrm....I'm sure Mr Jobs got a great laugh out of this one.

POPUPS get your POPUPS here!

[imtheguru]

http://www.real.com/ads/html/popunder_.html
Durin g downloading RealPlayer 10 free version.
OK so its a popunder. Semantics.

Die already Real Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

In the early days I liked Real Player. It was nice. Now when you install the damn thing it puts crap all over your system and is very annoying. I will not even install this product anymore and if I come across a RM file then oh well, I dont see it. I dont think I'm alone here and I dont think they understand that. They want market penitration yet they dont know how to please consumers.

I would LOVE this

[greggman]

Listen.com/Raphsody kicks all kinds of ass over iTMS. If they could sell iPod compatible songs it would be the best system ever.

RA ... buffering ... buffering ... buffering DEAD

[Anonymous Coward]

RA is the one that is the dinosaur. RA was useful when we mostly had dialup and needed compression - so much so that we were willing to put up with watching 7 frame rate and 800 ads packed into a 2" viewing window ... not to mention the famous buffering ... buffering ... buffering ...

And their credibility with mac users & apple? - it took them 7 tries to deliver a player that wouldn't crash upon launch - gee, you want us to lower to your standards?

Um, who exactly are you again?

Not only - what have you done for us lately - but what have you EVER done for us? Not just mac users but all internet users?

All of your technology has been about creating a closed locked DRM with expensive encoders and now that you are third in a two player race - suddenly you complain that others have a locked system that won't let you in?

Maybe you should've saved some of those 800 ads money for something useful - for now, you will be remembered as part of the beginning dark ages of the internet - you are the "sov's," out of step with the times and like your 'buffering ... buffering ... buffering speeds' - too Balkanized literally and figuratively for this century. Buh-bye.

Missing the point

[ThreeDayMonk]

Does preview nag you to buy Acrobat? No. Does Mail suggest that you'd like to buy a different package every time you start it up? No.

You have - perhaps intentionally - missed my point. I have no complaint with QuickTime Basic supporting fewer features than Pro, but the nag screen is an unwanted extra feature that makes the application "broken". QuickTime is an advertised feature of OS X. The nag screen is something akin to bait-and-switch.

Now, if I had known about the date workaround, I'd have used that instead. I didn't know, so I found another solution. At no point was I "whining", as you characterise it. In fact, I was a satisfied customer after removing the nag screen.

Re:Missing the point

[MikeTRose]

Now, if I had known about the date workaround, I'd have used that instead. I didn't know, so I found another solution. At no point was I "whining", as you characterise it. In fact, I was a satisfied customer after removing the nag screen.

Yes, but you had to (illegally) use a crack code to do it, and you made a point of complaining that Apple forced you to this action. "Is it illegal? I don't care." Well, then, get over it. There's nothing in the EULA or advertising for OS X that says you have to be free from annoyance and adware, so your choice to steal software is guided by your own moral compass (your annoyance is more important that Apple being compensated for use of its code).

My theory

[Anonymous Coward]

By not allowing other people to use their OS on their own hardware, apple killed itself once. Not cooperating with "#2" and trying to be compatible is why Apple lost the #1 spot once. Glad to see they don't mind repeating mistakes.

sources, please

[alizard]

This is actually quite a common myth, they actually make about 30 cents a song,

See subject line.

USB cams will work with iChat

[Anonymous Coward]

USB cams will work with iChat with this shareware:
http://www.ecamm.com/

Provided you have driver support on OS X for your USB camera, this program makes it show up in iChat. It's been around for a while now.