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New G2 RealPlayer Alpha
The Rebel writes "It appears RealNetworks has an updated Alpha G2 RealPlayer for Linux.
Its dated 9-29-99 and you can get it
here." Yep. Fresh dates on the files. Anyone tried this "new" version? Is it really any different from the old one? Should we all run and download it or wait for the beta?
Why would Linux users really want to mess with Real Audio as compaired to QuickTime. At least with QuickTime there is a open source streaming server available for Linux, there isn't such a thing for Real Audio.
Anyone have a reason for one over the other?
I just downloaded this one a few hours ago after I got a notice that my old version had expired. My main complaint with this version is the CPU usage. 95%?! And that's only because more important things are taking up the other 5%. I don't remember the previous alpha being this slow. The audio quality seems about the same, it works with esddsp (I don't think it did before), and it hasn't crashed on me since I've gotten it (used it for a grand total of 15 minutes, though). But the CPU usage gets to me. I don't think the Windows version uses 95% of my 300mhz processor. Then again, maybe it does and I just didn't notice it before. But the sound gets choppy if I try to multitask while it's playing, which I haven't noticed before.
I'd love to. Do they have a Solaris version out too?
"Many Linux users found that their Real Player G2 programs stopped working this morning. Apparently Real Networks encoded an expiration date in the code. After some quick calls to Real Networks and some fast foot work by their technical people, the Linux G2 player has been patched so that it will not be expired. "
from linuxtoday
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
At least for Sorenson and whatever proprietary codecs are stashed in there. At least there is a Real client for Linux that works for some people.
I say "some people" because I never got the rpm to work (issues with RH 6.0?) and doing it manually was a no-go. I might try this new version in a day or two if there aren't any serious issues with this new version.
Anybody know if its possible to get the Real Player G2 to run in Slackware with libc5? Besides going to glibc of course..
To get too excited about any proprietary streaming formats when there's MP3 and MPEG... /I/ think it's worth the DL time...
.02, moderate at will.
True, their compression isn't as good, but it seems that video over a 53k line is pretty pointless anyways (Whoa man! I'm getting 5fps! Cool!).
I won't say a thing about audio, except that the superior quality of MP3 whoops just about anything, and
And then, of course, these progs are prolly glibc only, and won't work with Slack...
(One of many portability issues with closed-source software. No, I'm not a GPL nazi, I like source under ANY license, just so there's a
possibility that I could port it.)
Just my
This is in glibc only - grrr!
Contrary to what you'll read in the comments after the linuxtoday article, the red hat rpm version is also fixed, though they did break a symlink.
.deb package for realplayer, and it will appear in debian unstable this afternoon.
It also appears to have some new features, like playing a little sound clip on startup. And a new "presents" menu.
FWIW, I've uploaded the updated debian
see shy jo
And do they plan on delivering anything more than this barely-OK alpha? I'm beginning to doubt it. And there's still no non-x86-Linux support. I'll stop whining now; if you've tried the "first" alpha, you probably have an idea of what sucks about it.
Of course, this is still better than MS, who promised a new NetSho^H^H^H^H^H^HMedia Play^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows Media Player client for Linux for over a year, then switched to the "What's a Linux?" routine.
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=8^
> Do they have a Solaris version out too?
Yep. Use this link:
Kai
One of the few obvious changes in this release is the ability to play MP3's. Just what I wanted: yet another MP3 player. OTOH, I shouldn't complain too loudly because the RealAudio and RealVideo support even in the previous alpha version have worked flawlessly for me.
According to the release notes, this version sort of works with Flash content but doesn't yet play Quicktime or AVI files.
> Do they have a Solaris version out too?
l ayer.html?wp=dl0899&src=990919choice_1&l ang=en
Huh? Where did the link go?
OK, here it is again: http://www.real.com/products/player/downloadrealp
Kai
been around for ages, and doesn't work with hardly anything I want to play. Are they actually doing any development, or just think "there a half baked linux version, we'll leave it at that..
It supports most of the common quicktime codecs..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Both of the programs seem to think that they're the first software that came around that can read GIFs and JPEGs, since they seem to associate every file name the developers could think of with themselves. In reality, they fail to read some of them, but they associate themselves anyway.
Not to mention that QuickTime has that annoying "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro now" nag, and Real tries really really hard to get you to pay $29.95 (it took me about 5 minutes to find a link to the free version).
Come to think of it, I think that's one of the major reasons for those Netscape 4.x releases - all the bundled crap that came with them. AIM 3.0, RealPlayer, Netscape Radio, Winamp!, and PalmPilot Sync tools... ::sigh:: I think I'll just stick with good ol' 4.08 standalone.
--
is still stuck back on 3.0.
At least the linux.bin installs/runs under
emulation.
- Input gain is a lot lower, so I don't have to crank down the master volume every time I want to play a clip (this could have been an oddity specific to my machine with the earlier version).
- Subjectively, overall sound quality is significantly better, with much higher a signal-to-noise ratio. Plus, video quality and stability is much, much better.
- CPU usage is insane, as noted by at least one other person. I have an SMP box, and it's hogging one whole processor, according to "top."
- The "Lowest CPU Usage Best Quality" adjustment in "Preferences" seems to have an effect on quality in this version, with no apparent effect on CPU usage.
Testing environment:I'm curious about the results others have had. It seems like Real just tried to get stuff working with the last version, and has activated optimizations (or something) with this version -- just speculation.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring bohemian. ***
RealPlayerG2, as well as some older versions of RealPlayer 5.0 has a nasty bug: after exactly 1 hour of listening to a live broadcast, the player stops broadcasting, although the player goes on downloading the stream data. At least that happens under RedHat glibc-based systems. OTOH the latest 5.0 works great with the open.so patch.
/tmp.
Also, I do not understand why it has to steal almost all my cpu cycles (OTOH RealPlayer 5.0 = 2.5%). I added a nice -19 to G2 and works fine. Presets are not saved correctly. Instead of saving the remote location, it saves a local file created under
I guess Im gonna wait a little til it gets better.
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The new beta only uses 33% of my CPU, it lets me move around in the clips (something I couldn't do before), and double size....
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You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
The quality of audio and video provided by Real is mediocre. All the market needs is a better format and player, and Real's users will jump ship as soon as it takes them to download the other software.
Quicktime has the potential, as it already whoops ass on RealPlayer on the technical side, but falls short on the user side. As I see it, Apple needs to fix three things before Qucktime can fully take over the internet:
1. More clients! Minimum they need a Linux client, and wouldn't hurt if they released a general Unix player and one for the BeOS.
2. This is one of the few times (only time?) that Apple has made a user interface that totally sucks ass. The airbrushed aluninum (sp) look is cool, but the UI needs a total overhawl.
3. Ditch the nagware for the most basic functions. If I want to edit videos and save steams to my hard drive, pester me, but not for basic playback features!
If Apple can fix these things, they're in a position to bury Real and Microsoft, but not while they're screwing up on the little details.
Thanks for the info, but that page only allows downloading the 5.0 version. Am I missing something?
At the time, I was still using a 486 as my main computer (save the jeers for someone who cares :) and I wasn't worried about it.
So a couple weeks ago, I finally moved up to the late 1990s with an AMD K6-2 with more MHz than I really know what to do with. I start digging through Real Networks' site, trying to find this package, it's nowhere to be found. Site searches prove futile with all the keywords I can think of, etc. I can get (and in fact have gotten) RealPlayer 5.0, but that's all.
Yay Slashdot! Here's a new version! Oh, wait, it's actually the same as the old version. Real Networks hasn't, according to other /. posters, actually changed or improved the code beyond removing an old timeout.
It's three a.m., I must be lonely. Let's go download this baby. Hm. Well, it's glibc-only. Maybe I need to do that glibc upgrade anyway...
So what do we have? Six-month-old software, which is pretty old these days. The Linux version only supports a limited range of platforms (x86/glibc) - no libc5, no Alpha, nothing.
From Real Networks, Linux don't get no respect.
Is this level of support actually worth the trouble? It just seems wrong for them to pretend to have Linux support when they're not going to actually put effort into it.
No, you're right. Hmm, their pages are quite confusing. Maybe you should email them and ask. After all, according to that page, they only have 5.0 for Linux too while G2 is on another page.
bah. They properly embraced and extended RTSP so completely that their "developers" "open" SDK is totally useless...
No, I'm not complaining that real audio isn't open source. But why the hell can't I homebrew my own friggen rtsp streamer? So much for standards.
A big "fuck you" to real audio from me.
Yep 100% cpu usage on my 527mhz processor. Even when it is just buffering a stream. Playing a local .rm file (20kbps) => 100%. Playing a mp3 file (128kbps) => 30% cpu usage but sounds terrible. XMMS use less than 1% cpu power for god sake! BTW the older beta does not do this!
This version does seem to be a lot more stable, but the downside as mentioned before by a lot of people already is that it consumes up to one CPU of your system. Not really nice, but running it with an appropriate niceness seems to work fine and leaves the CPU available for other, more important things.
The mp3-decoder though is a little bit noisy and doesn't support playlists, so just use xmms or your favorite dedicated mp3-player.
These are three apps that I simply won't touch these days, unless I absolutely have to. I used to think that they were all great, but really they're just sucky token gestures...
1) RealPlayer. Anything that performs this badly (compared to the Windows version on the same hardware), looks this ugly and is this idiosyncratic isn't worth having. Real don't care about Linux.
2) Acrobat Reader. Stunningly slow. It runs barely acceptably at home in Linux, but on the multi-user Solaris box at Uni it's terrible. Adobe don't care about Linux. Thank God ghostscript does pdf now, gv is so much nicer in every way.
3) StarOffice. If I wanted a stupid program like MSOffice, I'd use MSOffice. Didn't they see all of MSOffice's flaws when they were copying it? And that Windows-esque flavour in one big X window makes me want to wretch. (While I'm at it, modal dialog boxes are pure evil. No well designed GUI should need modal dialog boxes.) And don't get started on the speed!
My conclusion: There are a lot of companies out there who couldn't care less about Linux or its philosophy, or why it works. They merely see a userbase to suck. The result is "token-gesture" software, which is just a crappy port of their Windows software. Only enough effort is put into it to get it to compile.
The saddest thing is that as Linux grows, there's only going to be more of these kinds of things... Especially as they continue to screw us over with non-free software...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
There's that magnifying-glass icon. It activates a small menu, and you can double the image size. For some reason I associated it with "search" all this time. On Windows, I just right-clicked to bring up the menu, blissfully ignorant of the magnifying glass. I was lost when right-clicking didn't work in Linux.
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=8^
The May 17 version worked on RH 5.2, this one
fails dependencies...
$ root rpm -e G2player-6.0-0.99051701
$ root rpm -i G2player-6.0-0.99092901*
failed dependencies: libNoVersion.so.1 is needed by G2player-6.0-0.99092901
I tried the rvplayer 5, I tried 2 different versions of the G2 player when they came out, and I tried this one. Every single one has just flashed up an initial window and then core dumped. This one is a major improvement over the others, because it actually plays one note of the initial tune before it core dumps.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I'm pretty sure we all want this. A decent Real Audio player for Linux. Here's what we do: /dev/null.
No matter how unstable this one is, we download it anyway. Real Audio sees the demand and gets cracking on the beta. The beta is better than the alpha, and we all download it. All of the sudden, Real Networks has a damn good reason to release another version. They have momentum! I'm going to get it at work and at home and download it directly to
By sissies, you mean guys like Linus Torvalds?
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Okay, this is strange. At home I have a
RedHat 6.0 system. Downloaded the new player,
and it worked just fine; streaming audio from
the 'net.
Then I get to work this morning, where I also
have a RedHat 6.0 system. Download the new
player, but it just flashes up the initial
screen then core dumps.
I've never gotten it to work here, even the
older version. I cannot seem to get the proxy
working to get around our firewall, even though
I manually configure the proxy information.
Also, when I try to start it up in standalone,
it complains that it cannot find my audio
device. Any way to tell it explicitly where
to find it?
Thanks,
Mike
--- witty signature
It's actually not nearly as bad as you think. Real uses Linux almost exclusively for their own media and file servers (www.real.com uses ROXEN, play.rbn.com/go.rbn.com is Apache)
The alpha/beta player truly is a new build. Go to help->about and look at the build numbers. The latest (released) build is 6.0.4.433, which was build on 092899.
I'd say kudos to RN for building (and using) great Linux server tools. Perhaps if they get some positive feedback (and excitment about a better product), we can get a really great G2 player for linux.
that you guys are.
using top. realplayer says 0.1 cpu and 11.0 mem
and varies between 78 and 90% idle.
What I want to know is how to set this up with Navigator. I added the mime type and Realplayer opens when I click on a link, but it dosn't load the file.
"Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Well the sound synchronization seems to work better where it didn't work at all previously. Sound synchronization is the bread and butter of bedroom hackers, not MSEEs staffed by a multimedia company.
Unfortunately, their RealProducer offering requires you to encode an audio track. All of this looks like a testing of the waters they tried in 1998 and since gave up on. The normal thing to do is all the video on a Win NT box and use Linux to serve it on the web, but my computer won't run Win NT long enough to encode a movie so I ended up requiring Linux to do all the production. Life sucks and then you die.
Oops, I should have read the original post. No, it won't work with libc5 only.
About the CPU problem. I responded to the guy about my experiences and he very quickly got back. He seemed surprised and eager to fix the problem. I think if we keep sending bug reports to these people (even if they are known bugs) then they will fix the package in a more timely manner.
YES.
There are more file formats supported with the G2 version than the old Rplayer 5.0. I was able tio visit more web sites with the last Alpha verison. THe quality was a bit better (IMHO) too, but I did not do any benchmarks. Video still has a way to go, but that will come when bandwidth increases.
Only 'flamers' flame!
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
The CPU usage is probably caused by a busy wait they're using to achieve synchronization. This is something you do when you first start multimedia programming but get over. Surely people who get paid to do this would develop a better way.
Just out of curiosity, when it comes to streaming video, do we have any other choices for Linux? I know there are other streaming audio players out there, but what about video? I know about MTV, but it sucks unless you fork over cash to get extra functionality. I hate being at the whim of 1 company that doesn't seem to like us anyway. -JM - AC because I hate creating those stupid accounts
This is the one feature I was missing from the previous release, and I'm glad they included it. Now I can watch my South Park episodes!
This "software" is useless on my redhat 6.0 system. It starts running, displays it's window, makes a bell tone, then segfaults.
If what you want to hear is a real audio stream, you need a real audio player.
the about window shows its version 6.0.4.433 (beta) so i guess they are out of the alpha phase....
I had some old Real 5.0 video clips laying around in the hard drive. The earlier G2 alpha wouldn't read them without dumping core. This one will. A marked improvement, IMHO. :)
I gagged when I saw a the pretty orange line on
xosview when running RealPlayer.
WORKAROUND:
Start it up, watch the pretty orange line,
Press pause, wait for the stream to stop.
Press pause again.
Now only 30 % usage (on my ikky P133)
Comment: At least RealPlayer can get through firewalls, XMMS can't (Unless I'm missing something)
I live in Radio hell behind a firewall so RealPlayer is a BIG help. (Gotta drown out my co-workers bitching somehow)
We implemented the latest Real Audio server and encoder under linux (tested NT, random crashes, figured we could automate restarts a lot easier under linux). Purchased 100 stream license, got the box edition mailed, whole nine yards. The install sucked. Couldn't even get it to work without calling their tech support and getting someone to walk us through some manual script edits, just to get the server and encoder to even start (the tech knew exactly what was wrong as soon as I described the problem, knew exactly what to change, why not have just corrected the distribution?) Anyway, we get the server up and running, encoding is going fine, setup a windows client to listen to the live streams we were testing, and everything seemed to check out fine. So we install the box onsite at a local university, get their school radio feed into it, everything looks good and we leave. 30 mins back at the office and the calls start, its not working. Get into the box, the server is still running just fine, the encoder is still running just fine, but the server has just randomly decided to quit listening to the encoder. If one of the processes had died we could have just wrote a little watch dog script to restart it, but the damn processes are still running. So we restart everything, and the streams start playing again. 20mins to 1hr later, more calls. Its down again. Over the next two weeks we try everything under the sun to figure out what is wrong, including numerous emails and calls to Real's tech dept. They let it leak that they know about the problem, and that we need to move to beta products to get around it. I don't want to implement beta products, they've got to beta for a reason, and I'm sick of chasing after their bugs. If you sell a gold version commercial product for a platform, and you charge out the ass for it, it should work (and not randomly require manual restarts...as many as 20 per day). If I had it to do all over again, I would implement netshow on an NT server. And I hate NT with a passion, but I've seen it work at another client location flawlessly without intervention, and it doesn't have a pricing structure based on streams. Sometimes, the linux solution must be better because it is more stable attitude just doesn't hold up. More pressure needs to be put on commercial companies selling linux solutions to stand behind their products. We spent so much time trouble shooting the freakin RA linux server, we couldn't get our money back from the license sales, nor an acceptable solution from them. As it stands, we have had to set a cron job to kill the server, kill the encoder, then start both back up every hour. This keeps knocking people off, but at least they can get a stream for a little while some of the time. Real Networks is WORTHLESS. If you have to implement a live encoding audio streaming server, go with netshow under NT. 2cents
As I said... I think it does this in the hope of giving better picture / sound etc
A buddy of mine reports this:
A eeeeyew! bad, bad, bad! On the machine here at work, I now have the
problem I experienced at home... where moving the mouse totally dorks
the audio. Additionally, without moving the mouse or anything else--
the audio studders and skips dramatically.
The previous version I had here G2player-6.0-0.99051701 didn't do either
of these nasties... Gotta get that one back!
It seems to me that this version of realplayer doesn't let the audio and video get out of sync like the old one used to. That's the sole reason I used my windows player rather than the linux one.
Real should look into making an ASF plugin (mpeg4 decoding etc) because we desperately need it in linux. I don't like having to reboot just so I can watch the matrix.. :(
I'd love to get a version of G2 for Solaris, and also IRIX too. However, all they've had to offer is just realplayer v5. How long has the G2 format been out now?
I've posted to Real's site a few times asking for information as to when they're going to release a version for these platforms. Nothing. No reply. Nada.
Now it's been 6+ months since we had this Linux 'alpha' version of G2 - which, I might add, the only way you can find it on Real's site is if you know the exact URL to it. At least, I've not been able to find it any other way.
I find it really really hard to believe that it's possible to have a G2 encoder/server out for multiple platforms, but no decoder/player out, or at least have a player so far back in alpha it's not even funny.
Oh - and get this. The encoders will let you encode G2 for free. If you want to encode for v5, you gotta pay. This, of course, means that you now have more people out there producing streams in G2 format - meaning almost all the UNIX users are just plain screwed.
And yes, this has become a business case where I work too.
-Frysco!
You claim that Quicktime is better but can
you answer these questions?
1- Does it play the shows on this page.
2-Does Quicktime run on Linux?
If you can't have a yes for both of these questions the next word that comes to mind
is moron.
Don't you hate it when people say ``implement'' when they mean ``deploy''?
I sure do.
Mine says it's a BETA, why is it still referred to as a ALPHA, also mine has the ability to change the screen size from normal to double.. (no full screen yet like in windows) Also the CPU rate is a little high, but it works great.
Debian 2.1 (Slink)
P233MMX classic
Voodoo3 2000
128M ram
-- jga@wastelandranger.org http://www.wastelandranger.org
For example, many radio stations (e.g., NPR) are archiving their broadcasts on the web; this is a situation where ``play the file from the beginning'' doesn't quite cut it. The fact that, with RealAudio, you can skip around in the stream, so that the archive file can be six hours long but you can still find the part you're interested in without listening for six hours straight (or downloading the whole thing to your local disk first) is incredibly important.
As far as I've seen so far, you can't do this with MP3 streams: you can only listen from the beginning. Is that true?
Is there any work being done to make random-access of MP3 streams possible?
Why do we care about an upgrade of a particular port of a particular proprietary product? This isn't freshmeat after all.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The MP3 in Real doesn't work through the firewall, only Real formats.
For MP3 through a firewall, try MPG123:
mpg123 -p
I use it every day and it works great.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
I'm not an expert in the field, but isn't MP3 one of those compression algorythms that it file-based, instead of block-based? (ie. The middle of a file refers back to the beginning, etc.)
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"I already have all the latest software."
Use mpeg4 for gods sake, it shits all over
realcrapolo
Go to mpeg.org and follow the links, download the 15meg source archieve/demo clips.
Someone PORT this sucker to Linux, or are you all programmers gay and slack and have no idea of upcoming technologies and are alawys 3years late.
(mpeg2 etc)
All except for the licenses. Go to there developer website and look around a bit. I know that there is an SDK for making application that are Real clients (ie: annoyingly cheap and useless multimedia programs). I was toying with the idea of working on a port, but I am just not motivated enough. tsk
I was a bit miffed when I tried to listen to the linux program on pbs. The realplayer had just expired! And no link to a new one at Real.com
Then I tried to use the rv_50 version, but all it did was core.
Finally, I noticed someone had a link to the new version, which was not listed on the Real page at the time. It works fine for me. I haven't noticed it slowing my machine down, but then again I was just kickin' it listening to the linux program.
RedHat 6, waiting for glibc slack so i can switch.
for companies like Progressive Networks to compile their software for the alpha? Provided that their code doesn't have 64-bit issues (and there's an Irix 6.x version, so it probably doesn't) all that's necessary is building a cross-compiler or ftping the code to an alpha box and typing 'make'. I'm guessing there are at least as many linux/alpha users than solaris/x86 users (which they do support)... and probably a larger percentage of the linux/alpha users would use something like realplayer.
Fearing that my PPro 200 would choke on the new realplayer, I did a little digging.
date -d 'Sep 29 1999' +%s yields the number of seconds since 1/1/70 as 938651940 = 37f2b124 hex.
date -d 'Sep 30 1999' +%s yields 938738340 = 37f402a4 hex.
Using hexedit, I found only one occurrence of 37f2, at 0x36775. The full number is 37F2FFFF = 938672127, a time on September 29. I changed this number to the hex encoding of October 20, and I don't get ANY complaint about it having expired!
prometheus