100% Open Source Helix Player 'Alpha' Available

kforeman (Kevin Foreman, Helix GM at RealNetworks) writes "Helix Player 1.0 and RealPlayer 10 Alpha are now available. The Helix Player is 100% open source, and includes support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora, as well as SMIL 2.0 so that you can combine Theora videos with JPEG, GIF, or PNG images and RealText. The RealPlayer 10 alpha is a superset of the Helix Player alpha, and adds support for RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and Flash. See the release notes to find out about the rest of the enhancements and give the players a whirl. We love your feedback and comments as always, so use any avenue you are comfortable with (forums, email, bugzilla) and let us know what you think! The team has tried hard to get all the bad bugs out, but remember that it's alpha and constantly improving with your feedback and help. Enjoy the player!"

Comments

Now all that

[TCaM]

remains for my life to be complete is for Gator to OpenSource their wares.

Re:Now all that

[Wolface]

But since helix is 100% open source, how can it have spyware??

Re:Now all that

[Anonymous Coward]

He never claimed it did. Really... turn up the comprehension knob a little bit. You've got it set a tad too low.

Re:Now all that

[no longer myself]

I'm primarily an end user, not a developer. If someone wanted to release OSS with some sort of obfuscated spy-code then I certainly wouldn't know it. Sure, someone out there would probably discover it, and shriek about it, or just rewrite it, or deal with it in their own personal way... Open Source Software just means you can see the source code, (modify it, recompile it, etc...). It doesn't necessarily mean you can understand it.

Even if I could comprehend other people's source code, it's pretty dry reading, and far too many lines for me to sit down and emerse myself in the plot.

Personally I'm surprised that you don't see more spyware under OSS... But then... How would *I* know?

Re:Now all that

[comet_11]

But since helix is 100% open source, how can it have spyware??
LATEST NEWS: The spyware's coming soon, we promise. We just got a new developer on board and activity should start picking up real soon. - Jan 2002

Re:Now all that

[Directrix1]

The only promising thing I see coming out of this is the SMIL 2.0 support. Macromedia Flash sucks. They have suboptimal support for the unices and Mozilla(they still haven't even released Flash 7), and they have persistently ignored questions on the topic. Hopefully, SMIL 2.0 will replace them soon.

Re:Now all that

[arkanes]

It's happened, actually. Some guy took the open source (BSD-style) CD ripper CDex and repacked it (with nothing more than a simple string replace on the name, no less) into a new installer that included mounds of spyware.

Re:Now all that

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to read source code to determine that a piece of software is spyware. This should be ovious. If you do determine that it is spyware, you certainly don't need to read through all of the source code to patch it and remove the spyware features. If it is open source you can release this patch so people who don't know how to read source code can patch their copy of the software as well.

Re:Now all that

[Anonymous Coward]

What planet are you on? If it's "ovious" [sic], then yeah, you might not need to see the source. But if it's phoning home without explicitly telling you, then it's not so obvious. Why do you think they call it "spyware" in the first place?

If you don't understand source code, seeing it wouldn't help, and modifying it would be just plain silly. Not everyone who uses OSS even know where to look. Thanks to RPM's, apt-get, and the like, many end users never see the source. Fortunately the more widely distributed packages do seem to get checked, but again, those who don't know C from a shell script would have to take it on faith that those voluntary safeguards are in place.

As for releasing a patch, well, someone would have to read the source, understand it, then be so kind as to make it available, then hopefully (I guess we can use wishful thinking), people will find it, and apply it if it suits them.

I appreciate the philosophy behind open source, and some of the rhetoric sounds nice too. It doesn't mean that the problem will just fix itself though.

I didn't need to see source code to get MS Windows to do what I needed it to do, and (knock on wood) I haven't needed to see it using OSS (Linux) either. I'd like to acquire the skills to understand source, but at the moment I'm a little busy with trying to get my work done.

--
Speaking of obvious... Like you can't see through this anon... :-P NLM

screenies?

[nunofgs]

screenshots anyone? didnt think they made open source projects without screenshots anymore

Re:screenies?

[richie2000]

didnt think they made open source projects without screenshots anymore

They don't.

Re:screenies?

[2br02b]

MSAA [msaa.com], helping people with MS lead a better life.

Am I the only one who saw this sig and clicked on the link hoping to find help for people plagued by Microsoft? ;-)

Re:screenies?

[richie2000]

Am I the only one who saw this sig and clicked on the link hoping to find help for people plagued by Microsoft? ;-)

I sincerely hope not. :-D

I believe what you're looking for can be found here. ;-)

Re:screenies?

[kni52]

You're not. I was extecting somthing like that, only far more sinister, with the **AA ending and all.

Re:screenies?

[vikman]

(from my earlier submission to s.) Here are a few screenshots of the Alpha.

warning,

[Quai]

Both bz2 files extract to the working dir..

Re:warning,

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi!

Another warning: this is a poorly-disguised trojan horse, designed to get you to invest time and love in the helix interface so that you'll be suckered into using closed-source spyware, i.e. the Real Player.

(honestly, why would you bother? There are so many good players available, most of which have nothing to do with redundant parasites like Real.)

Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang

Re:warning,

[phoxix]

Both bz2 files extract to the working dir..

Hrm, I just DLed the source file and it didn't do that.

Anyways, you should always use:

tar xvjf foobar.tar.bz -C $extraction_dir

To prevent from this sorta thing

Sunny Dubey

Re:warning,

[mshiltonj]

Both bz2 files extract to the working dir..

[,,,]

You should always use:

tar xvjf foobar.tar.bz -C $extraction_dir

To prevent from this sorta thing

Useful only if you know IN ADVANCE that it dumps to cwd. Unless you do it as sop, which will give you a possibly confusing directory structure.

Re:warning,

[Anonymous Coward]

When dealing with tarballs, you're right, always assume they're of the (win)zip flavor and thus check:

tar ztf foo.tar.gz | less

Comes in handy about 15% of the time not messing up the files in $cwd.

Re:warning,

[adamfranco]

honestly, why would you bother? There are so many good players available, most of which have nothing to do with redundant parasites like Real.

A couple things: The community developed RealPlayer for Linux and the OSS Helix player don't contain all the crap that the RealOnePlayer on Windows does. I've only used the Realplayer for linux and it does what's needed* and little more.

* What needed?
Not a player for Ogg, mpg, avi, mov, etc, but a player for Real's closed source video streams. As much as I dislike the lack of openness in Real's formats, their tools for capturing and streaming video/audio do work quite well. As such, many places choose to use Real streaming servers. If that is the format that the content is in, I'd like a good quality OS piece of software to play it. This is what mplayer does and we love it. mplayer doesn't support Real a/v stuff, so Real is helping a project along that can do that with their video so they can sell more server software. Its good for Real if it works (and we don't get stuck with shizty players or no access to the format), if not; oh well, stream Ogg or something open.

Re:warning,

[simcop2387]

thats why i've got a sandbox for uncompressing files in my home dir that i usually clean out, its not quite a ~/tmp since i usually build everything in there and then clean it out (my ~/tmp is treated as something that i download stuff to look at once, and forget to delete)

Re:warning,

[Anonymous Coward]

Have some self-respect - instead of accepting Real crap, instead email the people whose content you would like to have heard and tell them why you're not in their audience. Probably it will be Microsoft that crushes them in the end but why not do your part? Don't be fooled by their attempt to cosy up to the OSS crowd with helix, they are an evil, evil company.

If I find that something I want requires Real software I don't want it any more. Why yes, I am still angry about the last time I installed Real Player! Are you listening Real? $300 for my wasted time should cover it, then I'd be prepared to take the chance and try again.

What's the point?

[dmayle]

Not to troll or anything, but what's the point? I've avoided Real Player like the plague because I feel I can't trust them as a company. This means that I miss out on the content that is Real only, but I've made my peace with that. So, given that, why would I want to install Helix, given that it doesn't provide the only major codec that I'm still missing, namely, Real?

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

You don't have to miss out on real content... mplayer plays it just fine. Infact it plays it infinitly better than real's own open source player...

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[veriy]

get Real !!!

Re:What's the point?

[spacefight]

Hm? I thought Real's own open source player does not play RA/RV according to the submission. Only RealPlayer 10 or whatever can do this. Helix itself is only playing stuff other players can play as well. Not sure about the SMIL stuff though.

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

Reread my post, thats were the infinite came from...

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[eclectro]

So, given that, why would I want to install Helix

Maybe to take advantage of unique promotional offers, special "member" content deals, opportunity to buy the deluxe version, discounts on merchandise, and news about regular updates.

What more could you want???

Re:What's the point?

[dmayle]

I was under the impression that real for mplayer only works using the Real Player codec (from windows), which is x86. I don't use an x86 system...

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

I do use a x86 system (atleast the one I use for mplayer) but I don't have any windows codecs on it... So it seams they don it nativly. (Might still be x86 specific though)

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[asciono]

Actually I think Real is atleast trying to do something for the community. Why they do it, I'm not really sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not 100% evil intension to try to gather around the OSS flock and storm Microsoft.

You question is almost like asking "Why install mplayer w/o any w32 codecs when there is xine (or whatever player you'd like) that does the same?".

I'm pretty sure that Real would've gotten alot more attention from the community if they've been doing this a few years earlier. Back then, when there were just a few players that never worked, people would've probably tried to help out.

Re:What's the point?

[rteunissen]

Correct, just go to mplayerhq.hu and download the `essential' codecs. It's a seperate download from mplayer, and has all the stuff you could want, including realplayer codecs without the nagging of registration, once in a lifetime offers and all that other nasty stuff. Unzip and install to a directory, and tell mplayer about the directory at compile time. That way you can even use mencoder to download those non-seekable streams to avi/mp3 and save them to disk.

Re:What's the point?

[Lispy]

If you are running Slackware you can find a codecpack for xine here.

Re:What's the point?

[TA]

The mplayer I have doesn't use any windows codec,
it does however use a real plugin (for linux).
Doesn't seem native to me.

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

You don't need the win32 codecs for real support.
Neither for rtsp support. (You do need the live.com library for it though)

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[pointwood]

So, who do you trust? Microsoft? Apple? That's the 2 other major players and I honestly don't trust them more than I trust Real. The difference here is that the Helix player is open source. That's a big plus in my book

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that it can't seek within a .rm file. I'd say that doesn't make it "infinitely better". In fact it's a 'real' PITA.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rethink your equation... x/0 != infinity.

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

Since it atleast supports it partly against not at all for the helix crap it can't be anything less than infinitly better.

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[pe1rxq]

Not with real numbers... But it is not uncommon to create a superset of the real number set and add infinity and -infinity to it.
The downside of this set is that a lot of calculations are not allowed with infinity since it would be dependant what x was.
Its a sort of one way system...

An easier way to handle this kind of things is limits. x/y where y reaches zero from above will have an result that reaches infinity. (Not sure I said the last thing right in english)

Jeroen

Re:What's the point?

[pantherace]

There are 3 ways mplayer can play realaudio/realvideo files:
1. Native ffmpeg or mplayer-only (I seem to recall it being libavcodec based (in other words: ffmpeg) but ffmpeg's online docs don't show realvideo just realaudio.) realvideo support. It has drawbacks: doesn't always play things correctly, and only is rv10 and rv20 (real video 1 & 2, and not 3 & 4)
2. Native Linux real codec. It uses the files that install with realplayer to play realaudio/realvideo. It is the native decoder made by real, so it works nearly as well as real ever works.
3. Windows dll codecs. Similar to the Linux codecs, but it uses the windows codec via a loader that branched from wine years ago. Same advantages as #2, but drawback of having to have windows dlls, and the even thornier legal questions.

Please note that #3 is available only on x86, while #2 is available on alpha & x86 (might be more if realplayer ran on other versions of linux) and that #1 was at one time (and still may be) limited to x86 due to problems with the code, though it should work on other archs. (That last I looked DID affect ffmpeg's sorensen video codecs, they are/were x86 only.)

Re:What's the point?

[jonwil]

Anyone working on making option #1 (the open source option) able to handle the latest codecs?

Re:What's the point?

[realnowhereman]

Unless x=0. Ooops.

e.g. sin(x)/x is not infinity for x=0

But you're right of course, that limits let you find what the answer really is.

Re:What's the point?

[Coocha]

There isn't much point, unless you're a developer. Now I finally have an open-source solution to developing and testing SMIL content. Real is still a company not to be trusted, but when you're in a corporate setting where you've been locked into using Real codecs and SMIL for content creation, personal choice gets thrown out the window.

Re:What's the point?

[NeurAlien6]

why don't you try Real Alternative? all the Real-only content, none of the crap!

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hyperreals are what's for breakfast.

Re:What's the point?

[zcat_NZ]

Well, almost. I can't seem to skip back and forth in my realmedia clips. But then I also have the same problem with some avi's, perhaps I just need to rtfm :)

Marginally offtopic;
I tried installing realplayer under Redhat/Gnome a long time back. Somehow, it managed to steal file associations for just about every media type, even things that it was barely capable of playing (swf, etc)

AND it screwed up Mozilla's config too, so even after I sorted out Gnome's associations Mozilla was still trying to launch Real for all the media types Real thought it might like to have a go at..
the whole mess took me HOURS to sort out (and since realplayer has to be installed as root, it had fucked things up SYSTEMWIDE too!)

AAAAAAAAARGH!

NEVER AGAIN. It's shit like this that just pushes me further towards being totally open-source.

(Technically not 100% yet; I have a bunch of win32 codecs and an NVIDIA card still, but I'm getting there :)

Re:What's the point?

[a_karbon_devel_005]

I'm not sure why people are so anti-real player to be honest. It's the only player for linux that I know that legally plays all the different codecs.

They've started an open source project that further strengthens their commitment to linux, though I would like to see more, but how can you fault them? Here's a market that regularly uses questionable codecs constantly, yet Real is trying to make itself available legally in our market. Do you see Windows Media player for Linux? iTunes for linux? If you do, tell me because I don't know about them.

Also, this is a company who has been snubbed out of a market by MS's desktop domination... I mean .. lets see 99% of computers come with Microsoft WMP, and you're Real... what would YOU do?

And on another note, most of my friends in the AV industry have said that the Real codec is, if not the best, in the top two ( next to MPEG-4 ) in quality/compression. ( of the formats in relatively common use today ).

Now.. on the NEGATIVE side, this is VERY very alpha type stuff (Helix) from what I've seen and I'm not aware of a Real Mozilla plugin, but then again I've not googled for it.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

but are they "gathering around us", or just jumping on our coattails?

Sure, we're free to improve their interface for them, but we can't use their proprietary codec, and we can't mix their open source code with our code. (They're not GPL compatible).

And note that it's only Open Source - not free software, and not acceptable to Debian.

Becoming nearly free software is good if it's the first of many steps in the right direction - but don't take you eye of the end goal and settle for compromise. (To their credit, they donated cash to the Ogg project.)

Re:What's the point?

[vikman]

Technically RealPlayer10 for Linux (which gives you free RA/RV/MP3/Flash etc. playback) is HelixPlayer plus those codecs. Seperating out a completely opensource player makes licensing easier to deal with.

This FAQ talks about this differentiation in detail.

Re:What's the point?

[cubic6]

Look up hyperreal numbers and infinitessimal calculus. Really fun stuff which gives a solid system to calculate with infinitely large and small numbers.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you describe are usually called the extended reals. If you add -\infty and \infty then x/0 generally isn't going to be well defined. Would 5/0 be \infty, or should it be -\infty? If you just want x/0 to be defined for x non-zero you could just use the one point compactification of the reals where you just add a single point at infinity. Hyperreals(mentioned above) are somewhat different.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't have said it better myself. Linux users should be grateful that we have a native player that's specialized in online streaming media. I can understand why a windows user would dislike real, but how the hell can a linux user dislike something that's attempting to bring us a native, fully compatible media player?

Re:What's the point?

[TheRealDamion]

Please note that #3 is available only on x86, while #2 is available on alpha & x86 (might be more if realplayer ran on other versions of linux)

um?

List of clients in the pulldown for UNIX on the real site:

Linux/Alpha (Debian)
Linux/Alpha (Red Hat 6.2)
Linux/Sparc (Red Hat 6.2)
Linux/PPC 2000 (TiVo?)
Irix 6.5 (Mips - same as Agenda/PlayStation2 arch).
Irix 6.3
AIX 4.2 (Power CPU)
AIX 4.3
Solaris 2.6 (Sparc)
Solaris 7 (Sparc)
Linux 2.x (libc6 i386)
Linux 2.x (libc6 i386) RPM
hp-ux 11 (God knows what CPU)
Unixware 7 (i386)

In fact..

Known clients from my head:

MacOS - all version to the best of my knowledge, including 68k Mac!
BeOS (heard of, not seen)
QNX (read press releases about, never seen)
TiVo (read press releases about, never seen - would be v2 ppc only)
RiscOS (up to Real v3 - milky had)
linux 1.2.* (up to v5 - still able to download it)
win3.1 (still able to download)
new cmdline player splay for linux-x86 no X needed / hxplay

Win32 (everything) - This is a large list.

PocketPC/Symbian/Mobile Real - Many devices, different compiles of
RealONE for the different devices due to screen size etc..

There are probably others I've forgotten about.

Ogg is completely open source, so in /theory/ it's available on all
platforms. But anyone guarentee
somebody has bothered to compile Ogg on as many platforms ?

It's basically a two horse race and Real have always made efforts to provide for just about every platform. Those who complain about the player are basically admitting to being Windows uses as the UNIX players have always been very nice to use. None of this shite theme/skin crap I have to worry about with pointless slow shaped windows in the OS players.

Re:What's the point?

[pantherace]

Please note the first line of my post: There are 3 ways mplayer can play realaudio/realvideo files:

I was not talking about realplayer, I was talking about how mplayer can play realaudio/realvideo. I may have to add sparc & ppc to the list for #2, which only supports Linux realplayer/realone libraries, but I don't know of anyone trying it on sparc & ppc. (I do know it works on x86 & alpha).

Not to mention, their online music store runs on what? Win32 only.

Re:What's the point?

[i_rabbit]

But what a positive the 'NEGATIVE side' is!

This Alpha RealPlayer for linux has more features than RP8, is OS, and pretty stable for an alpha. It DOES have Mozilla plugins too. They should 'just work' but you may have to copy them over manually depending on your system and where things are installed. This is explained in the README located in the install directory which defaults to /usr/local/RealPlayer with the .rpm and /whereYouRunItFrom/RealPlayer with the .bin

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's open source, but it's not Linus open source -- it reminds me of the early days of Mozilla.org and how Netscape had the developers under their thumb and the website showed was dry and corporate. No wonder they didn't get any interest.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but right now we're just talking about the Player, so it's not just MS, Apple, and Real - we've got Xine and MPlayer too, which people trust. Real have gone out of their way to trick people (a scrollable 4 item box containing 16 tickboxes, with the final few ticked by default).

The new Real player looks good - they've finally done some usability work and it would fit into any desktop, but they'll need to work with distros, Gnome, and KDE to get desktop acceptance (actually, pairing with KDE would be a nice move considering how little corporates take interest in KDE).

Re:What's the point?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, first of all, RealPlayer sucks on any platform. It's slow, buggy, and acts like a virus, and all my Windows friends agree. I mean, I appreciate their open-source / Linux efforts, but just because Sendmail is opensource and there are open mp3 players doesn't mean I won't just use qmail and flac instead.

Second, the last Unix version of RealPlayer I tried, I was trying to get to play from the commandline for a simple internet radio application, or run it via an xmms plugin, but unfortunately, the only version I could get was linked with a fairly old version of GCC, 2.95 or something, and as such I could not link the opensource xmms plugin with both it and my Gentoo gcc3-compiled xmms. So I was stuck with a program that is all but a web browser.

And it did things like insist on having a display of every tenth of a second it played. Which means it was inefficient to play over a network.

I've heard about spyware, but it's the bloat and stability I don't like.

So quite frankly, Real can give us their codec source and keep the rest. Of course, I can't think why they would do that, unless they actually did care more about oupen source than making money.

Re:What's the point?

[robla]

Several reasons fo the Helix Player:

• Ogg Theora + SMIL 2.0 support. Sure, there are other players out there that support Ogg Theora, and support SMIL 2.0, but I'm not aware of any that support both.
• Highly modular architecture that scales down to fit on cell phones and other portable devices. We post numbers for the Symbian build, but the Linux numbers aren't far off.
• Array of industry partnerships. Why does this matter? Because we're getting more commerical licensees all of the time, and even for commercial licensees, we're making sure that the work that they do gets contributed back into the codebase, even if they are a commercial licensee (see section 2.2) and are otherwise terrified of this whole open source thang.
• Platform support - we support Win32, MacOS, Linux, Symbian very well, and a range of other operating systems to the point that those third parties can make it work on their platforms.
• A stable company with lots of money in the bank and growing revenues. Our last earnings announcement has more on this.

We plan to stick around and be a major force in multimedia for years to come, and have the means and ability to do it. You'll continue to see new developments all of the time as we continue to add features to support our commercial products, as we provide community grants to accelerate adoption of the platform, and as we get contributions from the community.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this player is 100% then the codec is too?

Re:What's the point?

[Replicant7]

Try the -idx switch.

Re:What's the point?

[chaoaretasty]

Nope, it's actually 1.

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.. let's see..

One is full open source (Helix Player, no support for Real codecs...)
One is not (Supports Real Codecs...) Real does not open up their own codecs for obvious reasons.

Standalone players ...

[ciupman]

... are neat, but i like media frameworks better. I 'm eagerly waiting for a final (stable api) gtreamer

Re:Standalone players ...

[Delirium 21]

The Helix Platform is a "media framework." According to their own page:

The Helix(TM) DNA Client is the universal playback engine designed to support the decode and playback of any data type desired ... The Helix DNA Client is designed as an open, comprehensive platform that enables playback of digital media products and applications for any format, operating system, or device. [It] supports any audio or video codec through well-defined file format and decoder APIs.

Re:Standalone players ...

[ciupman]

I might agree that it might be somewhat of a framework ... but looking at their schematics i couldn't figure out if it has any pipeline capability, like gstreamer, or even directshow, that so, applications made on top of that, would have only basic funcions (playing, decoding etc). It's also very "Player" oriented.. and a framework should do more that that.. Imagine i want to split a video file in two respective streams (1 for video and the other for audio), then apply a red filter to the video and a reeverb effect to the audio plus a delay.. and then join those streams back but now in a ogg container plus some subtitles ... Does this "framework" let me do this? I know gstreamer might .. and directshow too ..

So...

[BenBenBen]

So when can I watch a .rm without filling my system full of nagware, adware, spyware and bloatware?

Re:So...

[Feztaa]

Right now -- just use mplayer.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get yourself a copy of this, and install the real alternative, though you might perhaps need a copy of this

Re:So...

[BenBenBen]

I was being a bit of a devil's advocate - I use my Xbox for video, which is mplayer.

I get annoyed that the BBC, which I pay for, only uses Real formats for their distribution (Dirac, I know, I know). What this means for all of my windows friends/relatives is they all run RealPlayer, and all hate the pop-ups, nags, etc. On principle the BBC should not be making their funders use a commercial format, when there are dozens of viable open formats.

/personal bugbear

Re:So...

[spacefight]

There is a special Realplayer made for BBC out there.

Re:So...

[MrHanky]

Use MPlayer. But has RealPlayer really used adware in the Linux version? I've never noticed any when I used it. Maybe there were ads (I use my internal ad-blocking bio-ware to filter those out anyway), but I've certainly never seen any nagware or spyware.

It's always been a terrible player, though.

Re:So...

[TehHustler]

On the subject of the BBC's use of realplayer, can anyone tell me why, despite the oodles of bandwidth they have, their live news streams are broadcast at a pitiful 35kbps? I know they have the broadband news console, and the radio streams are of decent quality, but im talking about live events.

Re:So...

[Raspberry]

You mean you dislike the fact that every software vendor has their own memory-resident update notification software that eats your memory, cpu and bandwidth.

That's innovation!

Just buy a bigger processor and more memory, we're on our way out of the recession and it's cheap!

All hail:

tp4mon.exe
realsched.exe
UpdaterUI.exe
BROADC ~1.EXE
(winamp agent)
(now gaim's auto-update checker)
jusched.exe
ECTaskScheduler.exe

and whatever else has installed and reinstalled itself in your PCs registery every time you run their app.

Praise for VLC/Xine(Kaffine/Totem)/Mplayer and whatever else anybody prefers.

Re:So...

[BenBenBen]

Who said anything about Linux? Just because I'm hanging out on slashdot.. ;)

I run Linux on my router, Xbox and TiVo, and no-where else. My powerbook runs a better multics simulator as standard and my x86 runs WinXP (only ever over RDP from the powerbook though - bit faster and more useful than a virtual PC).

Re:So...

[BenBenBen]

Yes, ultimately it boils down to the fact that I like being able to control what runs on my PC and uses my resources.

I dislike having to install all of the above to watch something I paid for in the first place (10.56 per month last I checked).

Re:So...

[magefile]

The Captioned Media Project, a service provided for free to the deaf/hard of hearing by the Department of Education, only uses streaming Real because of copyright issues (i.e., they need to be able to track how many times you watch something). They're switching to Windows Media in the next few months though, since it now has DRM, and they say that Microsoft is contracting with someone now to do a Linux version. As long as MPlayer or similar can still play it, I'll be fine, but now I have to go do another codec hunt. Dammit.

Re:So...

[martin-boundary]

There's two problems with streaming, the quality and the pauses during streaming. The quality you can't do anything about, but you can get rid of the streaming pauses quite easily:

Using mplayer, record the .rm file to disk as it is being streamed:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile xxx.rm rtsp://where/the/stream/is

Then, using Linux, wait for 5 minutes and start playing the file from disk in a separate console:

mplayer xxx.rm

This way, you have 5 minutes worth of cached stream, and you'll never see the "buffering" message or other pauses ever again.

Re:So...

[Jaysyn]

You forgot tkbell.exe the little sonofabitch that makes sure jusched.exe & realsched.exe stay where they are(n't) supposed to.

Jaysyn

Re:So...

[PurpleFloyd]

Assuming you're running Windows (the .exe files are kind of a giveaway)...

1. Start -> Run -> regedit
2. Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \CurrentVersion \Windows \Run
3. Lean on the Delete key until satisfied.

Admittedly, there are still some damnable apps that will reinsert their startup program into your registry. If they don't have an option to disable their run-on-startup crap (note that even Realplayer and Quicktime do) I would suggest uninstalling that app unless it's absolutely essential to your system. Even if you have one or two apps that skirt the malware line in this fashion, though, it's still not too hard to get rid of 90% of the crap that infests the average system.

I do agree that I don't need every app on my system to have its own autoupdater. It's sad that my Windows 2k box, when all my apps have their systray crap on, can have a systray that takes up a good THIRD of a 1024x768 display's taskbar. Programmers everywhere should realize that their apps are never going to be the only ones running on a machine; they need to learn to share effectively. Perhaps too many programmers didn't pay attention in elementary school.

Re:So...

[Psykosys]

That version still has Real's obnoxious nagware and other junk :( ...it's all about the mplayer.

Re:So...

[TehHustler]

Pretty useful, the pauses annoy the bejesus out of me. Of course, you lose the live-ness of the stream, but, ho hum.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't have an option to disable their run-on-startup crap (note that even Realplayer and Quicktime do) I would suggest uninstalling that app unless it's absolutely essential to your system.

You could use regedt32 to set permissions on the Run registry. Edit -> Permissions. Set it to read-only and that problem goes away.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Using mplayer, record the .rm file to disk as it is being streamed:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile xxx.rm rtsp://where/the/stream/is

But I already have xxx.rm

Re:So...

[palutke]

I dislike having to install all of the above to watch something I paid for [bbc.co.uk] in the first place (10.56 per month last I checked).

Then vote with your wallet, and don't buy it. You can complain all you want, but as long as they're collecting your monthly fee they have no incentive to change anything.

Re:So...

[BenBenBen]

You don't quite seem to have grasped the unique way in which the BBC is funded. Namely, compulsorily, by act of law.

Re:So...

[mwood]

Indeed, you'd think that *someone* would notice that Windows has had scheduled task support in all versions since 1995 or so. Why on earth does every product need its own timer gadget? (Answer: they don't; these guys are all working too hard because they're too lazy to learn how the system works.)

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you install RP10 on windows, or get linux.

Re:So...

[chris_mahan]

Get rid of your television(s).

Besides, who needs TV when you have a PC?

Wanna watch movies? Bah, movies are so bad lately...

Wanna keep your TV? Then keep paying your BBC Fee and STFU :)

I moved from Europe to the US to avoid this kind of crap.

Now, in defence of the BBC: I think their programming is stellar, and you Brits get a good bang for your buck.

Re:So...

[palutke]

Ahhh! I intrepreted your post to mean that BBC offered som soft of extra subscription service that you were paying for . . . my mistake.

No windows port...

[arduous]

So it looks like I will be sticking with Real Alternative

Why do some many open source developers limit their program to just the linux world? On my main workstation (XP box - don't work, I have linux servers just about everywhere), I have Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, FileZilla, Nvu, OpenOffice, VideoLAN, GAIM, Dev C++, and many more.

Re:No windows port...

[pe1rxq]

Why do some many open source developers limit their program to just the linux world?

Most programs are more limited to the posix world than to the linux world and will run (maybe with some minor tweaking) on anything that resembles unix.

For a lot of open source developpers its a hobby... Why should I care about windows? It is such a pain it is just no fun....
I am not a big corporation wanting as many customers as possible, I don't car about windows users.... I like programming and if someone finds my stuff usefull than great, but it wasn't the reason for writting it.
But the source is available, if someone wants a windows version its possible (just don't wait for me doing it for you).

Jeroen

Re:No windows port...

[Mr Europe]

Com'on join in !
You can join and start to maintain Windows port on any of those Open Source softwares !

The original developers probably use open source systems (Linux/...BSD) and they develop the system starting their own needs. Yet they give anyone opportunity to port the software to other systems if someone is willing todo it.

Re:No windows port...

[canavan]

It's not just windows, the various unices (including *BSD, and linux on non x86 platforms) are also not as well supported as I would like them to be. I've looked into porting helix to Irix - it can be persuaded to compile with some effort - but I find their ribosome build-system not very encouraging to say the least.

Re:No windows port...

[alex_tibbles]

I can't actually find the homepage of Real Alternative, just a bunch of download sites. Is it like mplayer, i.e. using dlls of dubious legality?

Re:No windows port...

[i_rabbit]

There are windows downloads available on the nightly build page: http://forms.helixcommunity.org/helixdnaclient/ These dont have the same GTK UI, but all of the nightlies pull from the same HEAD code base. The RealOne player, on Mac and Windows, uses the same core engine and adds proprietary extentions and a different TLC.

Codename HXPlayer?

[Quai]

In the about-dialog on the realplayer its named "About hxplayer" :P

Re:Codename HXPlayer?

[Plug]

"RealPlayer 10 for Linux" is the open source Helix player with the propriatary Real codecs.

Like Mac OS X is an open source layer with stuff on it. You can install Darwin if you want, but it's more interesting as the open source base for other things. In this case, hxplayer (the eight character abbreviation) as a media framework.

A few questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

a) Is there a link on the front page?
b) Can you see it?

That is all.

Record from realmedia stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will either of these two new versions allow me to record from a realaudio stream to WAV or similar?

Re:Record from realmedia stream?

[motte_fra]

if you use mplayer with the -dumpstream option on an rtsp:// url, the dumped file is then readable with realplayer (and probably others, but I haven't tried)

Re:Record from realmedia stream?

[fuzzix]

Will either of these two new versions allow me to record from a realaudio stream to WAV or similar?

If you're on Linux (or another Unixalike which can run The Vsound Virtual Audio Loopback Cable and realplayer) I have a little bash script which can make the job easier.

Most basic functionality just requires the rtsp/http URL:

$ realcap rtsp://foo.bor/baz.rm

Please don't slag off the code - I'm new to this and I was drinking at the time :-)
New version supporting ogg quality and tagging coming soon.

Re:Record from realmedia stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! Thank you for the information - this is extremely useful! Where can I send beer/money? Any preferences?
It took a little hacking to get everything to work for me, but I love it!

Mod parent up!

Helix Player doesn't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

I have GTK 2.4.1 and Gnome 2.6 but Helix doesn't compile. It bails out after a while on /player/common/gtk/hxplayer.cpp (or something like it) because it uses gtk functions that are deprecated. GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED is set to 1 on the header file, but it seems that the Real engineers are using an even older version of Helix.

Guys, if you are reading this, please try to compile your player with a newer GTK+.

And another one, there is no "make install" facility, how do you install that thing (if it compiles?)

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

>but it seems that the Real engineers are using >an even older version of Helix.

I meant GTK+.

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

I just found a patch to fix the compilation problems with GTK 2.4:
http://lists.helixcommunity.org/pipermail/pl ayer-d ev/2004-May/000439.html

The Real/Helix engineers should have TESTED with gtk 2.4.x before releasing the 1.0alpha version. I mean, they didn't even bother downloading a GTK+ version released 2 months ago already before they unleash their cr@p on us and having the compilation fail consistently!

And btw, why there's no "make install"? How do you install that thing indeed?

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[Frit Mock]

There is no 'make install', since they have not figured out, how to compile it, yet ;)

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, maybe you shouldn't break GTK every fucking release.

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[robla]

Uh...that's why it's called an "alpha". ;-)

We appreciate you pointing out the fix to the problem. However, contrary to popular belief, just because we're a "big" company, we don't have infinite army of developers to apply to this, and one of the things that drives us crazy about Linux right now is the practically infinite combination of compilers, libraries, and so on that all tend to break backwards compatibility on a frequent basis. With respect to company size, I say "big" because in the grand scheme of things, IBM, Sun, Microsoft and Cisco are big companies. We, on the other hand, are not (under 1000 employees).

As far as "make install" goes, we're not using automake, so we don't have that system. We've got our own build system that we've been using since 1996 (well before open sourcing). Though it's not what folks are used to, it is open source as well, and it's very powerful in its own right. It's written in Python, and it's religiously cross platform, capable of generating GNU make make files, as well as Visual C++ nmake files, CodeWarrior build files, etc.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[aminorex]

Thank you very much (really) for NOT using automake,
which is an abomination on top of a hack on top of
an obfuscation on top of an abortion.

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[dbIII]

should have tested with gtk 2.4.x before releasing the 1.0alpha version

Welcome to the world of alpha software. When it works, it will work with specific libraries, not with the lastest of a rapidly moving target like gtk.

The same cr@p argument could be leveled at gnome - who are giving us a configuration system that resembles an obfiscated windows registry, with the added inconvenience of having one seperate database for every user and only being able to modify it with command line tools that do not have a manual page. There are nice things in gnome that were copied from MS windows, so that is a valid tactic - but the registry, and to make it even more arcane????!!!

Re:Helix Player doesn't compile

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to say thanks for

1. first, your build system - yes it's new, but once it matures a better build system than automake would be welcome in the world.
2. second, your responses here - it's good to see you guys involved in communicatg with the community

Bag bugs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The team has tried hard to get all the bad bugs out,..

huh ... bugs are always bad right ??

Striving to be common ...

Re:Bag bugs ?

[OneDeeTenTee]

They mean that there's no "rm -rf /" bug in there.

Re:Bag bugs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some bugs *do* turn into features. For example the bug in 286 that lets you switch back to real mode from protected mode. It's been in every x86 processor since.

Re:Bag bugs ?

[i_rabbit]

Big bugs Little bugs Bag bugs even Log 'em! https://helixcommunity.org/tracker/?group_id=154

thanks for nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

seeing as the player is useless without the closed source binary only codec why should i download this player ?
there are plenty of open source players that do what this player does, we all know no-one is interested in the player and everyone wants to see the codec source and Real isnt going to do that so the offer of "100% open source" is worthless

of course this isnt really about the player but the codec and the server, we all know that if JoeSchmoe needs to play realAudio (because your server is serving it up (hopes Real)) he will download the spyware infested nagware RealOne not the helix player

Real must think us developers are stupid if they think we cant see through their helixcommunity as a fake "wannabe" project staffed by employees, Real are no more interested in Open source as Microsoft is

Re:thanks for nothing

[pointwood]

Not that I want to defend Real, but AFAIK, the player supports many, if not all of the Xiph.org codecs, so...

Re:thanks for nothing

[ajs318]

Back in the DOS days there was a programme called "DEBUG" which took a binary file as its input and displayed the corresponding assembly language source. You had to do a lot of guesswork; but when you had written Spectrum machine code using no programming aid more sophisticated than the character chart in the back of the manual, that wasn't as bad as it sounds. Surely a binary-only codec could be probed with something similar?

Extended disclaimer, for the paranoid: Pentium assembly language isn't a secret, reverse engineering for the purpose of creating interoperable products is explicitly permitted, and it's never illegal to decrypt something if you can prove you are the intended recipient.

Re:thanks for nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely a binary-only codec could be probed with something similar?

Like this.

Re:thanks for nothing

[dorward]

It is only useless without a closed source binary if you do no consider playing Ogg Vorbis and Theora and SMIL 2.0 content 'a use'.

Re:thanks for nothing

[noselasd]

hmmm.. sort of like objdump -d I guess 8)

Re:thanks for nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok - I'll make an initial statement here: I avoid Real products, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.

"of course this isnt really about the player but the codec and the server"

Isn't it actually the reverse of that? The problem with putting Real Player on your computer (historically) is that you get a bunch of other crap in the bargain. You go to watch some Real video and then Badness 10,000 happens and you cry yourself to sleep.

Well, that's the player right? The player has all sorts of spyware. The codec is just encode and decode. I'm sure there are AV flavored geeks out there who would love to look at the codec code, but I guess I figure most people aren't that interested.

I've read here (what?! trusting what you read in /. comments?) that the helix player is just the real player w/o the codec... So doesn't this get around the most common complaint?

"I don't like the spyware in real player!"
"OK, so run helix w/ the closed source real codec - helix is open source and all the crap can be / has been removed."

Is this not the case?

Re:thanks for nothing

[SilentChris]

"thanks for nothing"

Name one reasonably successful open source media player that does not rely on closed source standards for at least a little of its success. Good luck.

Re:thanks for nothing

[Z-MaxX]

...and it's never illegal to decrypt something if you can prove you are the intended recipient.

I hate to break it to you, but welcome to the Digital Millenium... Copyright Act.

Re:thanks for nothing

[ajs318]

Even if that was applicable outside the USA, it still could not be used to prevent you decrypting a message you have the right to view. It's in either the fourth or fifth amendment to the US Constitution, something like that. Anyway, if a message is meant for you, then nobody -- not anybody -- has the right to stop you reading it. The DMCA, being a Federal law, is only applicable so far as it does not conflict with the Constitution.

Re:thanks for nothing

[brotherscrim]

Gee, do you suppose that maybe what makes a media player successful is its ability to...oh, I don't know...play different types of media?

Huh, maybe that's why successful open source media players rely on closed-source standards (which happen to be popular standards) for some of their success.

Re:thanks for nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Being apparently from the UK, you are probably unaware that if a Federal law says "black" while the US Constitution says "white", a Federal judge (and even the US Supreme Court) can almost always be persuaded to declare that "black" = "white" if that happens to be the Politically Correct argument of the moment.

Re:thanks for nothing

[vikman]

Is a player that touts the completely Ogg vorbis and Theora (and SMIL) as the primary formats so useless?

of course this isnt really about the player but the codec and the server, we all know that if JoeSchmoe needs to play realAudio (because your server is serving it up (hopes Real)) he will download the spyware infested nagware RealOne not the helix player

Why should JoeSchmoe get the (supposedly spyware infested) RealOne to play back content? Why not the RealPlayer Alpha that is based on Helix Player?

We ARE a "wannabe" project. But we are a wannabe opensource project that wants to excite developers and users alike. We work as hard as any other opensource person and we care about the open aspect of it!

Re:thanks for nothing

[SilentChris]

Exactly. The point of the original poster was that Real was producing an open source player without showing the source of the codecs. My point is that those closed source codecs are absolutely necessary, as there are no successful open source codecs. The success of the media player does not depend on the open sourceness of the codecs.

short answer no

[Phil John]

long answer...it is possible but not with these progs. You need a piece of software called Streambox VCR, this doesn't actually make wav/avi files however, but it does allow you to save a stream for future use. I know people who used to record BBC Radio 1 programmes (normally the live dj sets they have (the essential mix) from 2-4 every sunday morning). The BBC radio player is great because you can listen to all specialist shows for a week after they are broadcast, which gave ample time to rip using streambox.

Re:short answer no

[craigmarshall]

I'm trying to think of a way to do tivo-style recording and time-shifting with an Australian radio station (Triple J) which is broadcast via both RealAudio and WMA, I want to set up a system that'll record the breakfast show from Australia at Australia times, and play it back at breakfast time here (etc.). It'd only have to record the latest 9-11 hours of data, which wouldn't take up that much room if it were ogg-vorbis-encoded.

I'll take a look at that Streambox VCR program, but if anyone has any further ideas, please post 'em here!

</off-topic>

Craig

Re:short answer no

[fucksl4shd0t]

Ummm, mplayer? Seriously! You have to install the Real codecs, but it does fine with them, provided the website hasn't totally obfuscated the link (I can view the source on 90% of pages and get a link MPLayer can hit).

Mplayer will stream to hard disk, and iirc will also just output to stdout, and you can pipe that directly into oggenc, if you'd like.

Re:short answer no

[srn_test]

mplayer comes with a tool call mencoder that can do the same thing.

Re:short answer no

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't even need mencoder...
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile video.rm rtsp://etc...

Re:short answer no

[Anonymous Coward]

I adapted someone else's code to make this crappy little shell script to do just that. Obviously it's fairly basic and requires the use of cron to automate it.

streamgrab-0.1.tar.gz

Always happy to help out a fellow JJJ listener ;)

It works nicely, and I can now happily listen to Adam & Wil on my way to work, on my mp3 player...

Re:short answer no

[zot o'connor]

Yes, I am listening to triple J right now:

No need for realplay:

Goto Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO and read up, but ignore all that about vsound.

mplayer -cache 512 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -nofs -slave mms://media4.abc.net.au/triplej

Plays the station

Then dump the file:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile triplej.mms -cache 512 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -nofs -slave mms://media4.abc.net.au/triplej

Now with memcoder you can get clever an covert the ASF file you are saving to mp3 if you need.

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no use for such a thing as there are already mplayer, videolan, xine ...
I think they are trying to polish up their image in the opensource world. ("Yes, we develop opensource software ... partially ...")

wtf?

[timerider]

why do i need an account there to download anything?

Re:wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

so they can add you to the "developers" list making the project *look* busy, do you really think they have 50,000 (their numbers) active developers on this project ?

Re:wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the completely open stuff needs an account.

https://helixcommunity.org/project/showfiles.php?g roup_id=154

And NPR

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the fact that supposedly community supported radio won't have anything to do with community supported software.
Luckily, both the Beeb and NPR are no longer anywhere near as important as they were before the Net and RSS.

Great!

[TheSurfer]

My overall first experience feels good. All the video and audio examples are working perfect now. But I still have some problems:

• Xlib: unexpected async reply errors. I had this problem since the early hxplayer versions, and it's still here.
• Flash is not working in RP10alpha, I get a "general error" dialog. Too bad, because I'm searching for an alternative to the Macromedia Flash player/plugin (that thing is darn slow).
• The tarballs layout is plain crazy. Please archive your files inside a directory. It really suck to extract a tarball and find the files all over your home dir.

But looking at the whole thing, I can only say one thing: keep up the good work :) The player interface is really nice, and I'm sure the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

The async reply error is caused by call to Xlib function from variuos thread, without calling XInitThreads() before.

Or even simpler use only one thread to call Xlib function.

Re:Great!

[i_rabbit]

"Xlib: unexpected async reply errors. I had this problem since the early hxplayer versions, and it's still here. Yep and it is pretty random. If you can come up with a consistent repro case please log it: https://helixcommunity.org/tracker/?group_id=154

What about other architectures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it work on linux-ppc?
Is an update to realplayer for linux-ppc planned, or are we stuck with an old, ugly player with severe security issues?

Re:What about other architectures?

[Principal Skinner]

Mod up. "Open source" in theory means it can be compiled on Linux on any architecture, but a quick look through some of the pages didn't turn up any info on how to go about compiling it for yourself, let alone explicit consideration of Linux on other architectures.

Also no mention of how it plays Flash files. Does it work as a front end for (the proprietary) MM Flash Player, or does it include its own open-source implementation for the SWF format? This is the major thing I've been missing since switching to Linux on PPC; if there were now a working OS SWF player, that would be awesome.

The first one is free says the shadowy man...

[Raspberry]

where's the obligatory "registration required" notice in this Post?

Login with this ID:

Username: raspberry
Password: wedontneednostinkinpasswords

enjoy.

Re:The first one is free says the shadowy man...

[Duncan Howard]

I chose to suspend this account. I did so to protect ourselves from people uploading/posting inappropriate material and having not the faintest idea who the source is. Not (as many people may have assumed) to prevent people from accessing the public portions of our site/content/binaries/source. Au contraire, we've gone to great lengths to make anonymous access to all of these things available. Today we rolled out viewcvs which lets anonymous visitors browse our public CVS repositories.

In short we allow anonymous read access where we can, but users who want to post or otherwise contribute (write access) are required to register.

Regards,

Duncan Howard
Helix Community Program Manager
http://helixcommunity.org

Re:hmmm...

[madsenj37]

There are many uses for it. for one, competetion is a good thing. The more the better. It forces innovation and evolution in products. products have a reason to become better. Also, you are belittling their open source efforts. Soem open source is better than none. They are off to a good start. Apple and Sun both contribute to open source, but do not release eveything that way, why cant real?

You already can

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called mplayer. For the Windows users, use Media Player Classic with Real Alternative (among other download sites).

Re:You already can

[Jugalator]

I've used that in the past, but ended up getting the "real" thing instead... At least for me, RA had very low performance and choppy video. When getting the original, it was silk smooth. :-/

Well, at least now they support OGG...

[lotsofno]

If they're planning on touting Real Player's supported formats, they've got a long way to go.

Out the box, Winamp can play MP3, MP2, MP1, AAC, WAV, VOC, VOX, AIF, AIFF, AIFC, AUD, AU, SND, SVX, MIDI, MID, KAR, RMI, MUS, HMP, HMI, MSS, CMF, GMD, XMI, MIDS, MIZ, HMZ, MOD, XM, S3M, STM, IT, MTM, ULT, 669, FAR, AMF, OKT, PTM, OGG, CDA, MP4, M4A, WMA (lossless and pro, drm/no drm), AVI, MPEG, MPG, M2V, WMV, ASF, OGM, NSV...

If you have Real Player/Alternative installed, you can even just play the Real audio or video files through Winamp. Same goes for Quicktime. You can just stick with the good stuff.

FLAC, SHN, MPC, M4P/M4B, and many others are supported easily supported with plug-ins. And I'm SURE I've forgotten to list a couple formats that should've been mentioned.

Re:Well, at least now they support OGG...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It uses plugins for reading new filetypes. Don't get me wrong, that's great... but it you can't really brag about the number of file formats it handles when it's just using plugins.
2. It's available only for Windows. I guess you forgot that Slashbots are supposed to pay lip service to open-source operating systems.
3. Worst. GUI. Ever. Its skinability was cute seven years ago, but the rest of the world has moved on. Especially since Gtk and Qt are aready so themeble. Oh wait, I forgot you only use Windows.

Re:Well, at least now they support OGG...

[Anonymous Coward]

"you can't really brag about the number of file formats it handles when it's just using plugins."

the first 50+ formats he mentioned, were referred to as playable "out the box"--as in, natively. no plug-ins required for those. first fifty are free.

"Worst. GUI. Ever. Its skinability was cute seven years ago, but the rest of the world has moved on."

i'm sure a lot of people would argue with you on it's GUI even in classic mode, but i'm not sure how you can knock on the skinning when it's freeform skinning allows pretty much any GUI imaginable--you set the limit. as for the rest of the world moving on, once again, i'd have to say you're in the minority of thinking so. the day you see people not wanting to customize their applications or machines or even desktop wallpapers, is the day you'll see zero submissions on customize.org, skinbase.org, wincustomize.org, guiolympics.com, deviantart.com, deskmod.com, artuproar.com, etc., etc.. even mac users were hosting some kind of theming contest not too long ago that was featured here.

Re:Well, at least now they support OGG...

[Anonymous Coward]

the first 50+ formats he mentioned, were referred to as playable "out the box"--as in, natively. no plug-ins required for those. first fifty are free.

That's a bad thing. I'd rather not have that bloat.

as for the rest of the world moving on, once again, i'd have to say you're in the minority of thinking so.

I like to customize my entire desktop environment at once -- not each application individually. I'm pretty happy with the dozen or so Aqua ripoff GTK themes when I'm in Linux/BSD.

Debian packages ?

[Mr Europe]

Anyone knows if Debian packages exist already ?
If Helix is 100 % free it should find its way to the official Debian servers soon.

Re:Debian packages ?

[peope]

apt-cache search helix yields no appropriate results.

Re:Debian packages ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until 2015. Just after they get Gnome 2.6 out of experimental.

No, the good ones are just ...

[sreeram]

... called "features".

Now all that-To code with a view.

[Anonymous Coward]

"remains for my life to be complete is for Gator to OpenSource their wares."

In Soviet Russia. Gator opensources you.

Re:Now all that-To code with a view.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, In Soviet Russia YOU opensource gator... In the USA Gator Opensources YOU!

Re:Now all that-To code with a view.

[mwood]

Apparently Gator does that everywhere, not just Soviet Russia. :-(

Re:Helix player is retarded

[bhtooefr]

What the hell are you talking about, troll? Go to the link, click your preferred package format, and go. It's easier than a SourceForge download, because SF DLs ask you to pick a mirror - this doesn't.

Also, I thought you ALWAYS had to have permission to simply drop a patch in. If you don't like the way it's going, grab Helix Alpha 1, and throw your own crap on, and call it Protein Media Player 0.1 or something.

License is here

[peope]

There are two licenses. One is commercial and the OSI-approved is here.

https://helixcommunity.org/content/rpsl

Open source or free software? An evaluation would be nice.

Install the RPM

[Anonymous Coward]

If you install the RPM it automatically enables the plugin in Mozilla which works great on sites like News.com, MTV.com, and BBC.co.uk. This is the first time I've been able to view streaming content from these sites in Linux without numerous problems. I think a big congrats is in order to the Helix community who do offer the 100% free Helix player for download. It is only RealPlayer which contains the proprietary components. I see a lot of people bitching here who are obviously uninformed. Anyway, congrats to Helix, hurray streaming media on Linux!

Re:Install the RPM

[Anonymous Coward]

hey astroturfing dude, we don't belive ACs that recommend products but for some reason won't reveal who they are (unless you are embaressed to be using an RPM distro). Anyhow, fuck off astroturfer corporate goon. And remember mods. Mod up stuff from ACs, fine, but don't fall for lame product promos and if you ARE going to fall for lame product promos give them a 3 interesting..... not a 5.

Re:hmmm...

[Nermal6693]

So, again, what's the point in the Helix Player? If you can't play RealAudio/Video files, why would you want it? I'm not trying to flame or anything, but I just don't see the point.

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever downloaded a realplayer from their site? You have to click about four times on the "Get free player" button only to find out, that you re downloading the same version as the comercial one, but without a serial key. When installing RP they try to trick you into associating any media files (or at least the ones you don't want to) with RP. In order to get what you want (RP only for Real files) you have to tell the installer not to associate RP with any files.
Of course they can develop what they want. But a good mediaplayer is the one that plays the movie, not the one with a fancy ui.

-5, Not Informative

[anti-NAT]

The Helix / Real Player being talked about is for Linux / Solaris or Symbian OSes. So why compare it to WinAmp, when WinAmp doesn't run on any of these OSes, nor is the source code available ?

Re:-5, Not Informative

[raistphrk]

In all fairness, that's like saying "Linux/*nix are open source, so why do we compare those to Windows?"

Winamp has its pluses and minuses, but considering that millions of people worldwide use Winamp, the software has become the benchmark for audio software. Even xmms has been designed to look like Winamp. If open source developers brush off features in software such as Winamp on the basis that the software is closed source, and therefore not relevant, they lose out on a big source of ideas. The point isn't for open source developers to emulate closed source software; rather, it's that open source developers should be aware of the features of other software packages, and incorporate good ideas into their own code.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[anti-NAT]

My objection was that it was all about WinAmp, including the suggestion of running it ! Which of course, you can't do on any of the platforms that this version of Helix / Real Player works on.

I didn't see how that was informative and on topic (originally it was +5 informative), which is why I posted.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[demon]

How's about they do a build for Linux on architectures _other_ than x86? Like, say, PowerPC? I'd like to get rid of the old version of RealPlayer on my PowerBook and upgrade to something newer (if for no other reason than having current Real codecs for use with Xine...), but unfortunately they still seem to be falling into the "Linux == x86" trap. Sigh.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[i_rabbit]

PPC is close! It is all about managing priorities with limited resources. Believe it or not there are PPC users, *gasp*, inside Real.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[MattWillis]

I haven't tried it, but WinAmp did release an Alpha version for Linux. I think it has been abandoned, but you can try searching for it...

maybe here?

I found that grip/gqmpeg/x11amp work fine for me.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[anti-NAT]

I'm pretty sure source is available on the download page.

Re:-5, Not Informative

[demon]

Yes, but not the binary codecs for the Real 10 video and audio formats - and without those, the stuff it can play is stuff I can easily play through another player (like xine), so why would I need their player for that?

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Real does not open up their own codecs for obvious reasons.

Yeah, because the second they do, someone would write a better implementation of it, then someone would port it to mplayer, then nobody would ever need to use Real's software again.

I'd like to see Real succeed. It appears that they've made a true turnaround, but I don't know that for a fact because I'm done with their software forever.

Re: So when can I watch a .rm without filling my s

[RedLaggedTeut]

So when can I watch a .rm without filling my system full of nagware, adware, spyware and bloatware?

Just do rm -rf /.

I'd prefer a codec

[Nermal6693]

I get frustrated when I need to start up RealOne in order to play a RealAudio or RealVideo file. While it's nice for Real to offer a binary Linux player, how about releasing some system-wide codecs that any player can use? I'm clueless as to how the Linux media system works, but it shouldn't be too hard to make a system-wide codec, should it?

I use OS X, and I'd love to be able to drop a Real decoder into my QuickTime directory and have full access to Real files in any QT-capable app (which is most of them). They've released an encoder, but no decoder yet.

Re: I'd prefer a codec

[er_col]

echo 'deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install w32codecs

Also recommended

apt-get install mplayer

And if you run KDE

apt-get install kplayer

Re:I'd prefer a codec

[Deliveranc3]

There is one it's called RealAlternative or something it's about 3 megs available from Suprnova.org.

Re:I'd prefer a codec

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a os x realplayer (not a helix player) available from real.com... works great, much more well behaved then it's win32 companion.

When I can buy realplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

as a native OS X app, with no shit, just playing Real Media things from the web, updating it when I want to, then I'll buy it. Otherwise stick it up your arse.

Re:When I can buy realplayer

[Wesley Felter]

You just described RealOne for OS X perfectly (except it's free). I've been pretty happy with it.

Re:When I can buy realplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

I do still however feel like abused by Real, just because now they're offering sweets doesn't mean I haven't forgotten the beatings.

Re:When I can buy realplayer

[vikman]

I am the Program Manager for both the projects (Linux and Mac) and you see the influence of the Mac player's user friendliness on the Linux player (we hope). Not only that, they share code at several levels (Hxclientkit, the media engine itself etc.)

We are also working on getting the powerpc build of helixplayer for those who run linux on their ppcs. We need some help on that front though.

Re: So when can I watch a .rm without filling my s

[BenBenBen]

H:\>rm -rf
'rm' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Encoder/Proxy?

[upside]

This is slightly OT, but can anyone recommend a good FOSS stream encoder & proxy combo?

I've looked at the offerings on freshmeat but would appreciate opinions based on real experience.

TIA

damn...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd prefer it that realshit would be banned from "OSS world" with their ugly streams...

seriously... NO real is better than real...

Install on non RPM based distros

[mmport80]

Lots of people know this, but for those who don't a program called Alien can convert packages from RPMs to DEBs etc. http://www.kitenet.net/programs/alien/

Cool! A Symbian version! :)

[motown]

I'm going to try this out on my Nokia 6600. :)

That phone already contains an older version of Realplayer, but according to the site, you can simply install this version on top. :)

People, stop bitching about Real and remember the fact that they are still the only one of the big three media player providers (Mediaplayer, Quicktime, Realplayer) who have ever taken the Linux platform seriously.

Even with opening a major part of the source (though not the GPL), they went a lot further in openness than the others ever did.

Also, A recent remark from someone working at Real (in response to Apple's Itunes patent) pleased me: "In the ten years that we've been developing and offering Realplayer, we never patented any part of our GUI". :)

Of course, that doesn't mean they never patented anything else in their software, but at least they've thrown their full weight behind open patent free codecs such as Vorbis and Theora in addition to their own technology!

Real, you are hereby forgiven for all your previous adware/nagware crimes! :)

Download this player and help to maintain Real's (still considerable) market share to keep Microsoft at bay! Real has seriously reached out to our community and we need all the allies we can get. We would be fools not to accept them on our side.

Re:Cool! A Symbian version! :)

[iso]

People, stop bitching about Real and remember the fact that they are still the only one of the big three media player providers (Mediaplayer, Quicktime, Realplayer) who have ever taken the Linux platform seriously.

That's only because they're in "last place" in the codec wars. Every big commercial software company these days likes to show they're into the marginal platforms when they're in last place. Real supports Linux because they're desperate. If they were truely interested in supporting Linux they'd provide support to the gstreamer libraries and RealPlayer plugins to gstreamer.

Re:Cool! A Symbian version! :)

[be-fan]

Every big commercial software company these days likes to show they're into the marginal platforms when they're in last place.

Oh, last-place companies like Softimage, Alias | Wavefront, Pixar, Oracle, IBM, etc?

3gpp support

[motown]

Hey, the binary players support then 3gpp format as well! Finally a Linux player that can fully play movies I made with my phone!

Yes, mplayer can be made to play back the video in that format, but as far as I know, it still doesn't support the format's sound stream codec yet. I'm sure Real's new player does.

Very nice.

Software

[m1chael]

meets brand name business. Outsource your production and focus on marketing.

I try to avoid Real on my Windows box

[OgreChow]

I have RealPlayer installed, but I will always choose another format when given the option. Why? The Real-Tray icon. It turns itself on whenever Real plays something. This annoys the bejesus out of me. There should be a configuration option so that you can set the Tray icon to NEVER come on. Why would it ever be useful to me anyway? Who uses this thing?

Re:I try to avoid Real on my Windows box

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a configuration option so that you can set the Tray icon to NEVER come on.

There is.

Re:I try to avoid Real on my Windows box

[OgreChow]

Direct me to said option, oh anonymous one!

license and semantics

[Stallmanite]

There are two licenses. One is commercial and the OSI-approved is here.

Commercial is not the opposite of freesource; proprietary is.

Open source or free software?

Same thing. Except in rare cases. The concept of "open source software" is a fork of the concept of "Free software", expect with slightly lower standards. diagram

An evaluation would be nice.

I looked for it on the FSF list of license summaries but didn't see it.

Re:license and semantics

[peope]

True that commercial is not a great word to use. It was to describe the targeted audience for the licence.

Nitpicking. Never heard the term "freesource". Proprietary is not the opposite of open source software I would say closed source software is. I belive you can have proprietary open source software.

I dont agree with the statement that open source and free software is the same thing except in rare cases. I would define free software to be software that can be used for whatever purpose without royalties and includes source code. With used in this context I also mean giving it away and modifying.

Open source is software does not guarantee you are free to use it as you see fit. However it gets bundled with the source.

I believe it depends on your values whether there is a big difference between open source software and free software. (nitpicking even further. All free software is also open source software but not all open source software is free software)

Re:license and semantics

[Stallmanite]

The root of our disagreement seems to be over the definition of open source. There are 2, you are using one and I am using the other.

What the English words would naturally suggest is that "open source software" is software with sourcecode available.

The Open Source Definition is the definition endorsed by ESR, the guy who coined the term. This definition is almost exactly (but not quite) the same as The Free Software Definition endorsed by RMS, the guy who coined that term.

Man, this is a mess.

Well ;-)

[RedLaggedTeut]

Install cygwin to get the full power of "rm".

Of course it is always wise to have backups if you tried out programs and commands you know nothing about.

Well

[RedLaggedTeut]

Install cygwin to get the full power of "rm".

Of course it is always wise to have backups when you try out programs and commands you know nothing about.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

rd /s /q \ is the Windoze equivalent to rm -rf /

never illegal to decrypt something if you can prov

[dpilot]

I believe you're unfortunately wrong on this one, under the DMCA. There is some work underway to fix this to work as you say, but I'm under the impression that it's going to get buried by the best legislators the ??AA can buy.

Well look at that!

[OgreChow]

I downloaded a new version and it now has that option. Ignore my complaining!

Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Qbertino]

RealPlayer is *not* Spyware. And it's not shoddy and it does *not* bloat your system.
Lots of Ads at startup? And a crappy website for years on end? Ok, I'll give you that. But anything else is just plain baseless FUD!
I must say that I am gratefull for Real actually offering a Linux Player for their stuff long befor any other company had the amount of braincells to grasp the concept of alternative OSes.
It works, doesn't look to crappy, even on Motiv-only systems (which is quite an achievement, admit it) and SMIL is actually a very nice thing and was an official, fully XML compliant open standard long before SVG even crossed the mind of any one at Adobe and Macromedia still was f*cking around with a crappy Flash 4 that couldn't even get it's own IDE sorted out. Not that they have been able to do that up to date.

That this OSS Helix Player is bound to be the first one to support SMIL 2 is an impressive thing and could actually use some moral support. Real back in the dot-boom days was the only thing you actually could do dynamic rich media media with. I was doing SMIL with an EDITOR back then. Try that with any other 'open' standard even today.
As soon as this works I'm outta Flash 2k4 Pro again in an instant. Unless Macromedia gets a grip and sorts out their serious IDE problems. They actually should do that before they semi-port stuff for Linux with Wine, imho.

Bottom Line: Quit the Spyware Legend and support a working streaming media standard that isn't half as nazi about DRM than Mickeysoft.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[BenBenBen]

I'd say that a program that installs itself and runs constantly without my asking it to, that can't be disabled or stopped from within itself, and which includes a built-in SMTP engine for mailing out stuff to HQ counts as Spyware.

Maybe we just have differing definitions.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

Real's recent mea culpa isn't enough for me. I still don't trust them. Once bitten, don't you know.

Also, Real 10 just doesn't work the way I'd like it to. As a media-player, I prefer iTunes and Winamp. All the XML in the world doesn't make shit smell any better, imho.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

And obviously you haven't used the Helix Player or RealPlayer 10 for linux.

1) the last player for linux was realplayer 8... are you saying rp8 has an smtp engine and spyware? It runs without asking and you can't stop it? then you obviously have never used realplayer8 on linux and dont know how to use your linux system. I've never had rp8 add a run level 3 start script.
2) I just tried realplayer for linux and I had none of the issues you speak of above.

Do people not realize that this is a good thing? I for one am happy we have the beginnings of another player on linux that's open source to boot.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what is funnier: repeatedly refusing to write the word "fuck" or sticking up for a software company that relies on tricking customers into buying the deluxe version of their player software.

Oh, and just because SMIL is not backed by Microsoft doesn't automatically make it good.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

RealPlayer doesn't have an SMTP engine, you can disable it from running at startup. Your a fucking idiot.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[BenBenBen]

I'm not talking about Linux, as I explain elsewhere in the thread. Last I checked, /. wasn't OS-specific.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

My a fucking idiot what?

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[k98sven]

Maybe we just have differing definitions.

No, it's just obvious you're running different versions. I agree with both. The windows player is a total piece of crap which I'd never install on my machine, (if I used windows).

The Linux player, on the other hand, is a quite tolerable piece of software, without the nastiness of the Windows version.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Kazoo the Clown]

I stopped using Realplayer on Windows not because of adware or spyware, but because the players at the time, hijacked your settings. Quicktime did it too, and there was this war going on in my system for awhile for which would be the "default" player for the various audio formats, that didn't include me in any of the decisions. I don't know if either of them still do that, but it moved them both to the very bottom of the priority list, and so far, I haven't found the need to bubble them up to the point where I figure it's worth the trouble installing them to find out.

I figure Real's days are numbered anyway, any business model that's survival depends on either priviledged IP or being the only game in town is inherently devalued by information exchange (i.e., the internet), not to mention that it tends to make them less than trustworthy.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[Anonymous Coward]

The last player was RealPlayer 9 and actually i have a binary of RealPlayer 10/One here. I won't discuss how it sucks, since it regulary crashes my whole DE, but i do have it. Native.

Re:Once a-f*cking-gain:

[instanto]

Real were a few years back revealed to be using spyware.

Nothing can forgive them for this.

Thus; real is a spyware company and should be avoided.

Just because they have supposedly changed their ways, felt that CONSUMERS SHOULD BE RESPECTED since their life in the market depend on them, or become better at hiding their spyware does not make REAL an alternative on the desktop or anywhere anymore.

Real is just another spyware company and I'll be glad once they are run out of business.

Quit bitching.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Damn buncha Slashbots and their anti-Real groupthink. What is it that's always being said? "It's the applications." Here we have Real, an ISV that has finally committed to supporting Linux ... and y'all are bitching about it.

RealPlayer 10 (alpha) was an easy install ... I just plugged in the RPM and went on my merry way. I didn't even have to go find some eastern European web site where software patents haven't been legalized, to get a player with actual codecs in it. Sure, everything can play OGG. Big deal. Go find me a media site that has OGG feeds available. RealPlayer is a great way to output not only Real's own formats, but stuff like MP3 as well.

Real needs our support, not our scorn. If you have a problem with their business model, or the 'extras' that are installed on the Windows platform, it would behoove you to politely tell them what your problems are. You are, after all, a customer. But please, for the sake of all of us, shut off the Slashbot hive mind for a couple of minutes and consider that Real is one of the VERY FEW things standing between Microsoft and a total WMA/WMV monopoly.

Re:Quit bitching.

[sharph]

Real has been supporting Linux for years now.

They are still evil.

Re:Quit bitching.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about control. If I'm not on top of you, then you're on top of me. Offer me a product without the 'value added extras' and I'll pay for it. I don't like being hijacked. This is why I now use a mac. Get real Real.

Re:Quit bitching.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Real needs our support, not our scorn."

Any company which develops software that spies on its users and interferes with the operation of their computer deserves our scorn.

RealPlayer (on Windows):

- Runs on login
- Displays ads in the "messege center" (even when you are not running RealPlayer)
- Sends the URLs of the websites and clips you view back to Real
- Sends a unique ID so Real can track your habits
- Takes over file exensions
- Resets the auto-run-at-login registry key if you delete it
- Displays advertisements all over the interface
- Misleads individuals into purchasing subscriptions
- Attempts to conceal the fact that they offer a free player
- Displays advertisments in the player after 30 seconds of inactivity
- Requires personal information and an internet connection to "activate" it

Why would a company which produces such crapware deserve anything *but* our scorn.

Real has been doing this crap for *years*. Their software was the first major product to contain spyware, and it set a benchmark for scum matched only recently by Gator and friends.

Being polite isn't going to get anything done. Real's product is crap and their policies are crap.

My problem with their business model is that they are a bunch of con-artists. I had to spend TWO HOURS on the phone with them after my grandmother accidentally signed herself up for a subscription to their "SuperPass". Real lured her in with a big sign that said "free" and small text that described what she was really doing (signing up for a 14-day "free trial" which auto-bills after 14 days and can only be canceled by calling Real).

Not to mention the advertisements for "full screen high quality video". Yeah, that will work great over my Grandmom's 56K modem. Yet the disclamer ("Broadband required") was in 6 point type at the bottom of the page.

Oh, and the advertisement she got to upgrade to the "Free!" RealOne player (actually just a free trial that auto-billed) was in her older version of RealPlayer - integrated into the plugin, so it looked like a part of the NPR page.

I WILL NEVER USE ANOTHER REAL PRODUCT EVER AGAIN. OPEN SOURCE, CLOSED SOURCE, FREE OR PAID, EVEN IF THEY CORRECT ALL OF THE ISSUES IN THEIR SOFTWARE, I CANNOT AND WILL NOT USE PRODUCTS FROM A COMPANY WHICH ENGAGES IN SUCH MORALLY REPREHENSABLE PRACTICES.

Re:Quit bitching.

[hendridm]

would behoove you to politely tell them what your problems are. You are, after all, a customer.

I'd say you're only a customer if you're giving them money. RealPlayer's customers are places like the BBC, MTV, News.com, etc that pay them for their streaming media platform. It is those customers who need to put the heat on Real. I think it would be more appropriate to complain to your favorite media site that makes use of Real, which, unless you're a subscriber, will happily ignore just as Real will.

"You're not making me money? Go bother someone else!"

Re:Quit bitching.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kick his ass, Sea Bass!

(All fun aside, I agree with you 100%. I never want to use a Real product regardless of how safe people claim it is or what license it's released under.)

Re:Quit bitching.

[robla]

Speaking as a RealNetworks employee, we do care about desktop users, even if they aren't traditional customers. Our goal for this year is to do our part in making desktop Linux a viable platform for delivering subscription services. Can't do that without a legal player, so we're starting there.

That said, as a publicly traded company, we've gotta make money, so you are essentially correct. Our revenue comes mainly from subscriptions these days, with really great growth around our RealRhapsody service. Last quarter, business products and services was $13.9 million out of $60.4 million in total revenue, so the traditional customers that you are thinking of make up a smaller part of our business than many realize.

That said, we've done our part to listen to those customers, and we think our product is much better today.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Re:Quit bitching.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go find me a media site that has OGG feeds available.

There are some. The major news/talk radio station in my area (KSL Radio) has an OGG stream, for example. It's no CNN, but it's a start.

Re:Quit bitching.

[instanto]

I'm sorry, but its to late to change your ways.

Would you forgive Saddam just because he apparently has become a much nicer person.. "I can change, I can change."

Re:but-does-it-play-ogg dept

[joeseph schmo]

hmmm, let me take a stab...

it _might_ suck ass... but it DOES play ogg!

Easier to use than windows? not yet...

[FatSean]

It's this kinda of crap that has relegated Linux to my secondary machine. Sure, I use it all the time as a server but when I just want to kick back and watch some midget porn, I can't be bothered to set compiler flags and autoconf parameters and what have you.

Re:Easier to use than windows? not yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep bad programming practices in an alpha release really drives that point in, right?

Re:Easier to use than windows? not yet...

[trashme]

OK Mr. Troll. Then don't use an alpha media player. Use mplayer, or xine, or totem, or one of the many other media players that work. I have no idea why I even bothered replying to this.

Helix Player not supporting Real formats?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Right, what does this mean?

The RealPlayer 10 alpha is a superset of the Helix Player alpha, and adds support for RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and Flash.

Does this mean that Helix does not support RealAudio and RealVideo? I downloaded a development release a while back, and it's not a bad player. I used it to listen to a streaming radio station. If I can't do that with the new Helix Player, what's the point? I'd need to download the bulky RealOne (easier, yes, since they stopped HIDING it on their site, but not open source). Why wouldn't they add this basic codec support to it?

Can someone clarify this? I was kind of excited about this project, but now I'm starting to wonder ...

Re:Helix Player not supporting Real formats?

[Wesley Felter]

The RealCodecs(TM) are not open source, but the goal of Helix Player is to be open source, so Helix Player doesn't include them.

Re:Helix Player not supporting Real formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, some confusion. here is an answer:

Helix Player = For Un*x/Linux
RealPlayer 10 alpha = for Un*x/Linux.

The players they are talking about in the original post are both for Un*x/Linux.

RealPlayer 10 for Win32 was released about 2 months ago.

So, on linux, you have two options. A opensourced helix player that wont playback real media but will play ogg/smil2/etc or installing RealPlayer 10 alpha and get the extra real formats.

What you have to look forward to with Helix

[raistphrk]

Buffering...

Re:hmmm...

[Directrix1]

Because it encourages adoption of open formats, thereby preventing lock in.

Please cooperate with Gstreamer

[daemonc]

Gstreamer is a complete open source media framework. It is being adopted by the KDE and Gnome desktop projects, making it the defacto standard for media applications in Linux/*BSD.

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec. The benefit to you is that all of the codecs supported by the current Gstreamer plugins would be available to Helix player, without any additional work by your developers.

Gstreamer developers have approached the Helix developers and offered to cooperate in the past, but received only an absurd response about "splintering".

Cooperation between Helix and other media frameworks would be mutually beneficial. Lack of cooperation only ensures that Real's codec will marginalized on Linux and eventually obsoleted.

Re:Please cooperate with Gstreamer

[a_karbon_devel_005]

Gstreamer's plugin system is ideal for making a proprietary codec such as Real available to open source players, without having to open source or give up control of your codec.

It's not the CODEC clueless. Do you think they care, as far as users go, about their freaking codec? You can already play rm files in mplayer and elsewhere, all illegally. They don't want control of the codec they want the PLAYER. They want people to see ads, BUY their player (pro version) and listen to their radio stations ( free and not-free ) because that's one of their sources of revenue.

And why SHOUDLN'T they? Their a business besiged by MS and it/s WM* formats!!

Re:Please cooperate with Gstreamer

[daemonc]

The business model of selling a media player is inherently flawed, and I think that Real knows this.

The real money is in content providers and licencing fees.

Re:Please cooperate with Gstreamer

[i_rabbit]

Thanks for including the 'Splintering' link. In it I see a very good point made by Rob which you have convieniently glossed over (or perhaps it is the myopia of a linux dev);

"...We're looking for integration into GNOME, but we're also looking at producing a world-class, *cross-platform* multimedia system, and we've got to focus on the one we've got (Helix). While it's theoretically possible to port GStreamer to Windows, Mac OS, and Symbian (for example), it's *done* for Helix."

Why doesn't GStreamer work on Windows or Mac?

A published HelixSDK, not just the Producer SDK, might go a long way towards this mutually beneficial collaboration you speak of, regardless of platform.

Re:Please cooperate with Gstreamer

[Anonymous Coward]

GStreamer compiles on Mac OS X without any modifications. It has done that for a long time. In Bugzilla, you'll also find Mac OS X native audio card support code.

As of a few weeks ago, it also compiles under Win32 (using either Cygwin or Visual Studio), although there's no audio/video card wrapping support yet (via Directshow or so).

Helix has no Sun Solaris support, while GStreamer does. Same for HP-UX, BSDs and several other OSes. *Those* are the main targets of GNOME and KDE.

And I didn't even start about the gory licensing issues that Helix has. It is definately GPL incompatible. It has no chance of being a GNOME or KDE media framework like GStreamer does.

What's so bad?

[21chrisp]

I downloaded the realplayer and I have to say that it is quite nice. Why is everyone complaining about it?? Does it matter so much that it's not open source? It is very lightweight and simplistic. It opens instantly and plays pretty much every type of common audio file. In fact, I see this becoming my prefered audio player. It is basic and intuitive and I don't have to squint to find buttons (a la XMMS). I particularly like it's gtk2 interface. GXine seems to be the only other common media player that uses gtk2, and it's a little too big and bulky for audio use (IMO). I'll have to try realplayer's video capabilities out sometime when I'm not at work... It's too bad that Real gets such a bantering from the open source community. This seems like a nice product.

Re:What's so bad?

[a_karbon_devel_005]

I guess you've never seen Totem then?

REAL SUX

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because you can't easily convert from Real to any other format. That, plus their bloatware.

Every time you load a Real file, God kills a kitten.

Difference between open source and free software.

[jbn-o]

It's interesting that this story is pitched as "100% Open Source" because that highlights the difference between open source and free software. This is a perfect example of how the open source movement is not about giving all people (including users) software freedom; this is a player program that depends on an uninspectable, unmodifyable, unportable binary core. This program in its entirety is being pitched as "100% Open Source" -- a clear invitation to become dependant upon RealNetworks for getting updates to the meaningful part of the player without regard to what the community has shown a predilection for doing time and again (in fact, just recently we had a front-page Slashdot story about how the Linux kernal was ported to yet another CPU, thus expanding its popularity while retaining and underlining the importance of software freedom).

Mix streams using SMIL

[robla]

Yes, you can do that. It's not through pipelining, but there's many points in the audio/video path where you can insert filters and such. We also have full SMIL 2.0 support, which allows for mixing multiple streams, and with this release, just open sourced our RealText implenentation for subtitling in a SMIL presentation.

Moreover, the Helix DNA Producer (also open source) has the sort of pipelining functionality you are talking about.

Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks

Re:Mix streams using SMIL

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's not as well designed as GStreamer, but it's backed by a shady company. Where do I sign up?

mplayer as alternative RealMedia front-end?

[jbn-o]

If mplayer did this on non-i386-compatible platforms, and if it did this with a program for which there was complete corresponding source code available under a free software license, I'd say you have made an excellent point. However, I believe that the only reason mplayer plays RealMedia is because mplayer calls the same library Real's player does. Which makes mplayer little more than an alternative RealMedia front-end; the library which does the actual decoding work is no more trustworthy because it being called by mplayer than if it were called by Real's own front-end.

When mplayer is just another RealMedia front-end, mplayer's programmers effectively become a buttress of the RealNetworks monopoly (to borrow an excellent phrase from the FSF). This is precisely the point I was warning against in another thread.

Re:mplayer as alternative RealMedia front-end?

[pe1rxq]

It uses libavcodec (from ffmpeg which is free software) for real 1 and 2.
For version 3 and 4 it uses the libraries....
So its a bit of both...

Jeroen

Re:mplayer as alternative RealMedia front-end?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well if Helix is open, why not grab just enough of the real 3 & 4 ? Then MPlayer is totally free.

Re:mplayer as alternative RealMedia front-end?

[pyros]

helix doesn't plat the proprietary real formats. didn't you even read the summary? (i didn't read the article)

Helix Player is RealPlayer

[robla]

This wasn't an architecture change...this was a branding change. That's all. The RealPlayer 10 is nothing more than the Helix Player + binary components + Gtk app theme to add RealPlayer branding.

The source code + binary add-ons for the RealPlayer 10 alpha for Linux are available from our CVS repository, and will be available soon as a tarball.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Re:Helix Player is RealPlayer

[Random BedHead Ed]

Thanks for this info, Rob. Does this mean that I can download Helix and add the Real codecs to Helix as binary add-ons?

If so, this is pretty important information, and may be a make-or-break detail for many of your potential users. You'll want to make sure you state this right alongside "Download Helix for Linux," or some folks might be upset by a perceived lack of Real format support.

False.

[StarKruzr]

"But a good mediaplayer is the one that plays the movie, not the one with a fancy ui."

A good mediaplayer is the one with the extremely intuitive UI. Playing the movie is the easy part, especially when it comes to OSS projects.

If a maintainer cares..

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't someone from debian have to give a crap about maintaining the thing first? ;)

Re:hmmm...

[Uber Banker]

Yeah, because the second they do, someone would write a better implementation of it, then someone would port it to mplayer, then nobody would ever need to use Real's software again.

There already is a better implementation. One without the annoying UI. One that doesn't take any opportunity to associate itself with all media file extensions. One that plays real media files. One that is the Real Alternative, hey it comes with Windows Media Player Classic too!

Re:Difference between open source and free softwar

[Capt. Beyond]

uuhhhhh, I hate to break this to you, but Real's codecs ARE inspectible, modifiable, and portable.... in source form! All you need to do, is sign the correct license.

Re:Great! but some issues

[respite]

Works about half the time for me.

- It will load the video up to about 80 or 90% and then freeze indefinitely.

- Does this every time in epiphany but about one out of ten times in mozilla.

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Real provide a binary that can be included and used royalty free. If the interface wasn't completely retarded MPlayer could use it today, but then again, it may be retarded.

Real's Linux offering is missing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I started using both Linux and Windows back and forth, I've always used Real in my Windows system. Now, ignoring the spyware, bloatware, practices BS it does things I like a lot more then the cons would kill it for me.

With it in one program I can generate MP3 files, Organize and listen to my collection, transfer files into audio cd's and portable devices. All of this in one program. I have yet to find anything in Linux that comes close to that sort of thing. All the programs I've seen that do half of that never work.

That is what is missing from Real's linux offering. I want a complete port of the windows offering into Linux, not just the streaming media player.

We can't just make the codecs available

[robla]

Sorry. Here's the problem. We pay licensing fees to a lot of third parties, who bind us to using these codecs only for our stuff.

Moreover, we license the codecs for a reason. We do it to make our media framework and products more useful and enticing. So, while I'm sure everyone would love it if we opened these up to everyone else's framework, I would hope that people think it through enough not to expect it.

As far as answering what else is enticing about our framework, I'll address that in another post.

Rob Lanphier
Development Support Manager
RealNetworks

Unfortunately

[Sycraft-fu]

Just because someone would like something, does not mean they have the requisiste skills to make it happen.

This is one of the problems with the attitude of many open source people. Theyu often respond "You want it fixed? Fix it yourself, it's open source." I'm not picking on you, you were quite polite and obviously just trying to help, but this attitude is frighteningly common.

The problem is that the majority of people just CAN'T help contribute to OSS projects. They lack the ability to program. It's also not like doing something like a source port or fixing a major bug is trivial and something you can learn oto do with one programming class, it takes a lot of experience. So 99%+ (probably 99.99%) of computer users are instantly excluded.

Of those that DO have the necessary skills, many simply don't want to spend the time. There's a lot of things I see in the world that I'd like to see happen, many of which I have the power to make happen. Problem is, there is a finite amount of time that I have free. I have to pick and choose wihch projects I want to do more.

So just be wary of the attitude that because something is open source, people ought to go and help. Most can't and of those that can, most just don't have time.

finally

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

I have been waiting for this for a while. A native Real Player for linux is what we need. Furthermore, the Helix Player can potentially become the most popular media player for linux (although it clearly won't play as many formats as mplayer).

I just hope that these guys get the plug-in for Mozilla done properly. I haven't found a single media player plug-in that works resonably well.

Re:finally

[vikman]

Sivaram, the mozilla plugin is quite stable right now and we have had lot's of great feedback so far. I recommend you try it and let us know what your experience is. We can use as much feedback as you can give us.

Helix Player has the flexibility to add any media format that other players can play. It's a matter of writing a renderer/fileformat plugin. This is how theora & vorbis support happened.

-- Vikram Dendi Program Manager & Project Lead Helix/Real Players for Unix

Stupid registration

[motown]

Sheesh,

Why are they giving me such a hard time?

All I want to do is simply download a binary release. Why am I being forced to register for that? :(

Screw that.

I'll wait until it's finally publicly available.

Re:Difference between open source and free softwar

[jbn-o]

That's a virtually nil statement -- I imagine most software is available on such terms. If I'm willing to give up my software freedom, I could sign an NDA with a variety of businesses and then inspect and modify the source code to a variety of non-free programs. Obviously software freedom is not satisfied by any NDA. Furthermore, I am aware of no free software license that requires a signature.