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

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?

[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?

[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.

So...

[BenBenBen]

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

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

[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]

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.

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?

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.

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: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.

-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: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.

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:

[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.

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.

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.