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

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 ..

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.

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.

Re:Now all that

[Wolface]

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

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.