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

warning,

[Quai]

Both bz2 files extract to the working dir..

Standalone players ...

[ciupman]

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

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

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: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: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)

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.

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!

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.