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Streaming Audio 10 Years Old
SlimySlimy writes "This month, streaming audio turns 10. Though first introduced by Real, streaming multimedia is so commonplace today it's hard to believe that it didn't even exist 10 years ago. In line with one of their previous press releases, RealNetworks has released a mysterious website and letter from CEO Rob Glaser celebrating 10 years of Internet streaming audio, as well as announcing a yet-to-be-revealed 'revolution' in digital media. 'On April 26, we are changing the rules of the Internet again, and digital music will never be the same.' Here is their press release from 1995 (when they were still Progressive Networks) announcing the first streaming Internet multimedia."
It's some sort of two-wheeled motorized single passenger vehicle. Oh wait...
Streaming video still buffering...
You can't take the sky from me...
First Po
[buffering 36%]
Am I the only one who isn't impressed with the state of streaming media these days? I think the current RealOne player is garbage. At least the original RealAudio wasn't nearly as bad, but it still consumed a lot of RAM and CPU cycles on my 68040.
At least VoIP and video conferencing have taken off and work quite well.
What are some of the better one-way, RealOne-like streaming formats these days?
In Win95, Real Player came as standard and had no spyware or data monitoring capabilities at all, it played ra and ram files and thats all it needed to do, tip for budding software companies in there somewhere iam sure
I despise RealPlayer.
I thought a mysterious website was a site where no one knew the URL for it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
So wait.. do we hate Real or not ?
streaming multimedia is so commonplace today it's hard to believe that it didn't even exist 10 years ago.
Actually, I find it harder to believe that it is now 10 years old. Now I feel old.
then let me know what you think of Real player.
It's like the "I guess we better make a Mac version" edition.
there's more than one way to do me.
Seriously, isn't Streaming Audio/Video just another solution searching for a problem that isn't there? Why should I use Streaming Media and suffer from bad quality, have to disable my other uses of my connection, risk having to wait for re-buffering,... when I can just download the same content in a proper format and use fast forward and rewind it, pause it,... in any way I like while watching it full screen in good quality?
Linux is not Windows
Don't criticise real, just this once. They introduced it, they were doing it over 28kbps modems (which is probably where all the buffering lines come from...it doesn't happen anymore, it didn't happen on a decent connection, what do you want them to do on a connection so slow, it's not funny), we should salute them.
I am trolling
Buffering
Just like cell phones and the voice encoders. They are complete crap most of the time, 'cause it's cheaper for the phone companies, even though the technology exists (and isn't all *that* expensive) to have our voices sound perfect in cell phones.
The audio quality of streaming media can be decent, but it often is not. This appears to be for the reason that websites need to cater to those with poor connections. And sure, some sites offer multiple versions of the same thing of varying quality, but that's a minority.
Streaming media is something that could be fantastic, but with all the lack of abiding to the standards and such, I'm not a huge fan.
Wouldn't MBONE count as streaming multimedia? It predates that by three years.
I do understand that there is enormous amounts of research and new technology poured into streaming media, but I still think to end-users (and myself), streaming is still a disappointing technology. Right now, with windows media and real, it often times is a crap shoot if the media will be there when you're watching it, leading to pauses and the infamous buffering problems. Real and Windows Media are sketchy programs that seem more interested in an attractive interface than ensuring the media looks good. Sure, we can go back and forth about if more people had broadband why it would be better, but right now the crappy resolution, encoding artifacts, and sub-par audio on many streams is unacceptable/unusable.
The best streaming I have seen is simple net-radio MPEG streams (or ogg), or apple quicktime. Apple trailers, though they take longer to buffer being such large files, tend to "guess" when to play it more accurately and are encoded like a professional video should look.
What I simply do not understand is why more websites, if they're pushing the same amount of bits either way, don't offer the complete file for download. I know that sometimes it is streamed to prevent copying, but more often than not, streamed media is not stuff that one would not want copied (being public an all). It may even reduce strain on the server with re-viewings done locally. I think users would be much happier to wait a minute longer if they get a high-quality video/audio file and they know won't stop half way.
It's a cool idea, but even after 10 years, its got a way to go.
How exactly are they defining "streaming audio"? Cuseeme was developed back in '93. I would consider that streaming media, and it's 12 years old.
I still remember playing with cuseeme in the computer lab at school. The connection was painfully slow, but it was really cool to see the humble origins of this technology.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
It's some sort of two-wheeled motorized single passenger vehicle.
Harley-Davidson is an order of magnitude older than 10 years.
If I got the option to download an audio or video clip in "256k" or "broadband", I would make the same choices as I do now with "streaming" media, and I would also let it "buffer" and then start viewing the stuff before it was completely transmitted.
But then I would also have it
- on disk
. I could see it once more, check which media player supports the freaky file format, etc.Streaming media is the throw-away camera of the digital world.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
To be truthful, the first stream wasn't in 1996. It was way back in 1994, when WXYC started streaming using CuSeeMe. WREK (Georgia Tech's student radio) also started streaming with their own in-house software the same day WXYC went live, but it was not officially advertised until a later date.
More information at: http://wxyc.org/about/first/ and http://www.wrek.org/wreknet-first.html.
-R
How much did real pay for this excelent PR on slashdot? I mean, linking directly to press releases is news now?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
EFF Patent Busting Project - Top 10 Most Wanted: http://www.eff.org/patent/ Acacia's July 21, 1992 patent + 1 year earlier: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,132,992.WKU.&OS=PN/5,132,992&RS =PN/5,132,992
Actually this thread topic is wrong.
Streaming media is much media is older than this according to prior art submissions by the defendants.
I don't want to complain about something I never use, but I've always wanted to see live streaming video on my computer that I could somehow easily verify the transfer delay on. Is there a live video stream somewhere other than cable/satellite tv that I can view?
I thought that Internet Wave audio had the first live streaming. Maybe it wasn't truly streaming?
I recently downloaded Real One Player for Mac OS X and I can personally attest to the fact that they have serious quality issues to iron out. I dl'd the player to listen to the Final Four streaming. I live in Germany and miss sports back home. While the basketball games streamed just fine, anything with video stuttered. Often I lost the connection completely and the clip started over, only to flake out again half way through. Another grievance: If you clip on any news piece from the CNN NewPass you can't just watch the video, a browser window pops up directing you to a CNN story on exactly the same topic. If I wanted to read the news I wouldn't have opened Real in the first place. What if I want to have the news on casually in the background while I check my email? I'm out of luck. I use a university connection and get pretty good (though by no means wonderful) performance. By all accounts, I should be able to stream video with no trouble. It might be that RealPlayer had trouble with my proxy. It might be that I'm an international user. I'm not sure why either of these facts should be issues in the age of broadband. I should be one of Real's target niche customers. Hell, Glaser once said in an email that he started the sports ____Pass service because he was tired of missing home baseball games. A final complaint: When I tried to cancel the service I was told to call a 1-888 number. As an international customer this didn't make sense. Why should I have to pay to make a call to cancel a free trial? Their online help was nearly useless, and I had to submit a question with their email support twice before the service was canceled. Even if the engineering department were not the real of old (alas, nothing's changed), their marketing folks are still swine. I rest my case.
WXYC, the first radio station to stream over the internet, is offering a free CD for download to celebrate their own 10-years-of-streaming anniversary. (Be a good citizen and use the torrent.)
2^5
it's hard to believe that it didn't even exist 10 years ago.
Is it?
Even when you think that 10 years ago Microsoft Internet Explorer didn't exist and 15 years ago the world wide web had only just been invented?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
They introduced it, they were doing it over 28kbps modems (which is probably where all the buffering lines come from ...
No. I have DSL. If I go try to watch, say, the Daily Show on Real or WMP, I expect that about half the time I'll have pauses or drops in quality or whatever because of connection issues. If I go to watch, say, a movie trailer in Quicktime, it downloads as fast as possible, shows me how much is downloaded, lets me start when I think I'll be able to see the whole thing, and lets me pause and jump around within everything already loaded without lag if I want to see something again or wait until the rest is loaded.
All of the cracks about Real come because the model of only giving you the data *right* when you need it is simply inferior to the model of giving you all the data at once. It's another example of rights holders crippling their own damn product in a hopeless attempt to prevent you from downloading it and showing it to your friends.
If web sites are using realtime streaming to show live content, then fair enough -- I don't blame Real if the connection gets slow. If they're using realtime streaming to show short pre-recorded clips that could easily fit in a RAM buffer, then they deserve ridicule for doing it, and Real deserves ridicule for encouraging it.
I see a Press Release flame war ensuing, touting the million or so subscribers that Real claims to have vs whatever million number of songs iTMS has served up.
Also, Real might be launching some new digital music service to take the steam out of Jobs's crowing over his pet project.
Just a thought.
or, as I like to call it, /.TV.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
"Back in June 1993 when HTML was more common in alphabet soup and the MBone, or the Multicast Backbone, was another technical novelty, STD was the first band to perform live on the Internet."
RealPlayer problem solved
Dude, it's ten years old. What do you expect? Of course there is going to be problems.
Why can't they seem to get it right, after all this time? It should work like a real radio. You type in the address of the station, and you hear the streaming audio. No mucking about with settings.
:-/
Instead, we get redirected to web pages full of ads, pop-ups asking us what proprietary format we can listen to ("don't you know?") and reminders that we could hear the bleeding music if we just "upgrade" by shelling out $4.95 a month.
It's no surprise that Internet radio hasn't taken off, really.
- MFN
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Or something that content providers want you to listen to, but not own.
If you can hear it, you can record it. Streaming media is no more secure than any other DRM-protected audio... that is, not protected at all.
free beer?
Shoutcast and XMMS. There are quite a few channels to choose from and in some cases the quality is pretty good. http://shoutcast.com/
I set up shortcuts to the audio feeds I want, which launch XMMS to play the audio stream.
OTH live or recorded video streams (usually real) to suffer from buffering and lack of any standardisation.
If they cant be bothered to impliment a sensible solution, I can't be bothered to waste my time on them.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
At the time that this was released, I was working on a project for streaming audio and video over fibre networks for a Imperial College in London (which is Britains top tech university). I downloaded the real player client and reverse engineered the protocol. To test it, I also downloaded a REM track off the net in .mp2 format. Yes, mp2 not mp3. This probably made me one of the first illegal music downloaders on the net. I wrote streaming software for DEC Alpha unix boxes and got thoroughly sick of hearing "Losing my religion" over and over and over again.
I'd stream "Happy Birthday" in celebration but, thanks to extensions of copyright law and overly agressive enforcement, I'd probably be arrested or sued before the candles were blown out!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
when I saw "it's not an elite club"...
Back in 2004 there was this little noticed press release on their website: REALNETWORKS MERGES REALPLAYER AND MUSIC SERVICES TEAMS INTO SINGLE BUSINESS UNIT. I bet what they're announcing tomorrow is the fruits of their labor, a single program that combines the single-track buy idea with the subscription music idea, into one program and hopefully does it well. Napster does it now, but their subscription program has so many different restrictions on it it's really annoying (eg "buy track only" or "buy album only" and such).
Obviously the "digital music revolution" thing is a lot of hype, but a combined program would be far more effective than what they've got now, so long as it works well and isn't bloated to hell. Also, it'd be nice if they took this opportunity to upgrade the audio quality on the Rhapsody stream files to something like 160 or 192 AAC/RA10 instead of the 128WMA they use right now (the actual pay per track music store uses 192 AAC)
I remember back in the day before anyone knew what a URL was, we'd ftp .au files from wustl and pipe it to /dev/audio on our sparcstations instead of saving it to disk (my univiersity acct had like a 1mb quota back then) streaming audio has never been easier than that
By clicking on or accepting the "ACCEPT" option below, or by installing, copying or otherwise using the Software, you agree to be bound by the terms of this License Agreement. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT, CLICK THE "ACCEPT" BUTTON AND/OR DO NOT INSTALL THE SOFTWARE.
so if you do NOT agree you have to click ACCEPT???? Is this why we love them...
How much did real pay for this excelent PR on slashdot? I mean, linking directly to press releases is news now?
Judging by the comments, not nearly enough. But just wait a bit, the rest should be coming through soon. Yeah, I had to make my own buffering joke too.
I read Slashdot for the articles.
Someday we'll get multicasting and streaming will actually work.
Probably totally offtopic but what the hey,
anyone know how I can listen to streaming mp3 with my SonyEriccson P800?
A blog I run for the wealth
c-span
The live feeds allow you to compare Real Video and Windows Media Player side by side. I have personally always preffered WMP.
transfer delay? Other than broadcasting horse racing or other ultra-time-sensitive material, this is irrelevant. Conventional streaming is always going to be some small amount of delayed, due to the various elements in the content creation & distribution chain (typically three computers, before it gets to yours, sometimes more).
I used streaming audio over IP in 1992. But 2005 - 1992 > 10. What's wrong here??
Streaming audio has been around a LOT, LOT longer than ten years. Commercial streaming audio, maybe. But the idea -- and mature, working implementations -- have been around for far longer.
Anyone else here use Speak Freely on NeXStep? I still fondly remember being the weirdo in the lab who was "talking to his computer" -- actually, talking to a guy in a different city over voice over IP. That was in 1994, and it even had support for encryption. Not to mention all of the work on MBONE.
Other streaming audio apps existed long before that, too.
Before contract with BBC 1%
After contract with BBC 99%
I just can't see any other use for this player.
Thank god for real alternative
My television begs to differ!
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
...as well as announcing a yet-to-be-revealed 'revolution' in digital media.'On April 26, we are changing the rules of the Internet again, and digital music will never be the same.'
Will it finish buffering?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I'm pretty sure that I remember setting up NAS to stream audio to X terminals in the early '90s.
-- Andrew
For me, it's either Real or mplayer. The latter almost *never* gags. Real, numerous times a day, pauses itself, half the time will not pick up, or it just stops.
Wish I could get mplayer to do *all* Windows media sites, so I could forget no-so-Real.
mark
In all my years of using Real Media, I've never seen it do the one thing I would expect streaming media would want to acheive:
Graceful degredation with reduction in average bandwidth.
Real Player, with it's buffer, accounts for the temporary peaks and troughs (short downloads...say, a page load) in your available bandwidth. But when you have long-term changes in your available bandwidth, Real Player can't cope because it requires a fixed minimum bandwidth for the stream. What typically happens is audio is retained and frames are garbled for LONG periods while it "resyncs".
It's as if Real didn't even stop to think about the very system they were creating. If multiple people are streaming or downloading large files on the same connection and overload each other's bandwidth needs, you're going to have annoying buffering pauses. Similarly, if a streaming server serves more requests than available bandwidth, it won't be able to serve out the stream fast enough, but it will still stupidly attempt to.
Most sites already have 2 or 3 versions of a particular stream (56k, ISDN, broadband). For a live stream, there is no excuse why a 300k stream couldn't be dropped down to 100k (or 100k down to 56k) temporarily until connection improves, since all three streams are simultaneously available and could easily be synchronized. And for non-live streams, why not give media providers the ability to create two or three levels of streaming quality that can easily be linked and used in a similar manner for on-demand streaming?
That would be the end of the "Buffering..." stigma. But I have never seen ANYONE implement such a concept.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
We did 13,000 viewers across the internet in 1991 to Sun Microsystems employiees.
Also my livecam technology (formerly at livecam.com) was going since 1994 with AUDIO!!!!
Even the Xing Streamworks product with Audio and video beat the real audio stuff out to the market!!!
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso