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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!"
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.
... are neat, but i like media frameworks better. I 'm eagerly waiting for a final (stable api) gtreamer
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
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.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
In the about-dialog on the realplayer its named "About hxplayer" :P
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But since helix is 100% open source, how can it have spyware??
Will either of these two new versions allow me to record from a realaudio stream to WAV or similar?
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
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.
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.
- Start -> Run -> regedit
- Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \CurrentVersion \Windows \Run
- 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.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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!
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?
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
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'.
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.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
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.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Right, what does this mean?
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 ...
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.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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.
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
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
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