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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!"
remains for my life to be complete is for Gator to OpenSource their wares.
Both bz2 files extract to the working dir..
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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?
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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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?)
They don't.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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
- 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 workif 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)
where's the obligatory "registration required" notice in this Post?
Login with this ID:
Username: raspberry
Password: wedontneednostinkinpasswords
enjoy.
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Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
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?
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
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.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
https://helixcommunity.org/content/rpsl
Open source or free software? An evaluation would be nice.
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!
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 ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
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.
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/
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?"
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
... 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.
RealPlayer 10 (alpha) was an easy install
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
Moreover, the Helix DNA Producer (also open source) has the sort of pipelining functionality you are talking about.
Rob Lanphier
Developer Support Manager
RealNetworks