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Yahoo & Broadcast.com Dumping Real Audio for MS
Well this rumor has been floating past my inbox a lot today, so I guess ought to pass it on. I have no proof, but the gist of it is that since Yahoo has acquired Broadcast.com, they have decided to dump Real Audio and replace all sound streams with Windows Media Player. As you can well imagine, this causes all sorts of problems for any alternative OS. This is apparently being kept very hush hush over there too, so keep your eyes open for confirmation.
Get the ASF specs here. It seems that Microsoft wants to make ASF an open standard, whatever that means for them: http://www.microsoft.com/asf/standards.htm. At least they're not hiding anything. And as ASF is built on top of MPEG-4, there should be at least some reference C code out there that one can work on. So I can only support the previous poster: Let's make a free client!
Last February, I became involved with a distance education course taken from Harvad Extension School on "Communications Protocols and Internet Architectures." The course itself was incredibly informative; I learned a lot from it in the time that I devoted to it. (BTW, if anyone wants a good book on protocols, I recommend Tanenbaum's _Computer Networks_)
Now to the meat:
This particular course offered its lectures (which were the bulk of the course) only in streaming video. That was all well and good; I had an ISDN line at the time, and was well able to cope with it. However, it utilized MSFT's proprietary streaming video protocol. Furthermore, the Netscape plugin failed to work to any semblance of perfection, so I was forced to use IE. In my opinion, this was the biggest flaw in the course - especially something aimed at one who will be knowledgeable about computers (it was a graduate level course). The use of Real Player would have made me much more willing to participate in the course, as I had to reboot into an environment that I hated to listen to any lectures with Microsoft's protocol.
What I want to know is this: when will people learn that using proprietary protocols only hurts their customerbase?
-- K
I checked broadband.com and an awful lot of the content I came across seemed to be in MS format. Especially video's.
A lot of places have been dumping Real in favor of MS Windows Media because of disagreements with Real.
ABC last month or so had a story out where they selected MS over Real because of Real's refusal to place their logo less prominently on a site carrying a web video feed of the Drew Carey show.
This is really Microsoft's secret to success. They wait until the competition starts shooting themselves in the foot, and then they move in with very favorable terms.
Gawd, I hate Real. Every time you install one of their damn players it feels like you married the bozos. They install a desktop icon, and add themseleves to all your bookmarks and favorites lists, and they add themselves to the NutScrape !@#$% toolbar (like you're going to worship at their web site every ten minutes for the rest of your life) and they add an always running background task to the Windoze SysTray (which is only there to advertise their existence and isn't required for any technical reason other than maybe to spy on you), and then they top it all off by having their player collect information about which streams and MP3s you listen to and report it back to their site.
Scum.
AC
I would love nothing more than to smugly point out the superiority of QuickTime Streaming. But, due to the same kind of corporate shortsightedness that prevents us Mac users from having an up-to-date Java2 VM, there is no QuickTime 4 player for Linux/BSD. ARRRGH!!
OK, vent's over, nothing more to see here. It is oo bad that nobody's snuck the MoviePlayer.app out of Mac OS X DP2 and onto a LinuxPPC box to see if it'll run in binary-compatible mode...(hint-hint)
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
It's a shame that Yahoo and Broadcast.com are replacing Real with MS, but frankly, I can't blame them. I worked at a large web site design company this past summer, and it was almost a matter of policy to avoid RealPlayer at all costs.
When you're trying to build a site with seamlessly integrated multimedia, what you want to happen is this:
1) Customer sees link
2) Customer clicks on link
3) Customer sees multimedia clip
What you get with RealPlayer is more like this:
1) Customer sees link
2) Customer clicks on link
3) 8 million pop-up menus: "REGISTER YOUR VERSION OF REALPLAYER!!!" or "DOWNLOAD THE LATEST VERSION OF REALPLAYER!!!" or "CHECK OUT ALL THE NEW STUFF AT REAL.COM"
This is a Bad Thing for a number of reason:
1) It destroys branding, i.e. the customer thinks "Real.com" instead of "Broadcast.com"
2) Every one of those pop-up menus gives the customer a chance to leave your site -- and go to Real.com instead to register, download, etc.
3) It's a royal pain in the ass.
Until someone comes up with a better solution -- i.e. a widely supported, open standard for streaming media (hopefully without a plug-in) -- Microsoft is the best game in town.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
That's not a very journalistic approach. Passing rumors about large internet companies does not seem to be the most responsible way to establish credibility or gain influence. I certainly hope this was not just a ploy to use that borg logo again.
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Based on my own observations, the MPEG and QuickTime 3 formats are the ones that I would use if I was hosting media content.
- -
Here's why I wouldn't pick the other formats...
REAL AUDIO
- The video and audio quality is terrible. Real Networks doesn't write quality playback software (don't know about the Win version but the Mac version is absolute shit). You also have to pay for the software to encode, serve, and decode the content (for the good versions). I've also never had a good experience trying to stream RealAudio content -- strange because streaming QuickTime and MP3 formats work fine.
I just get a funny feeling from RealAudio anyhow -- I avoid at all costs.
MICROSOFT VIDEO PLAYER
- Do I really need to explain this one?
I would use QuickTime or MPEG because they are truly cross-platform a/v formats. And FREE. You can serve QuickTime movies (streaming even) for free, hello DARWIN. QuickTime movies are easy to make and they look and sound damn good for the compression you get. Also, if you use QT3, Xanim can play it under Linux/UNIX (not sure about QT4 though... last I checked you couldn't).
MPEG Video, I'm a bit less familiar with, but from what I've seen it looks almost as good as QuickTime (if you're comparing quality vs file size) and I believe you can play it back on ANY platform.
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It just really disturbs me in general when sites pick formats that are only truly compatible with Windows. With so many excellent cross platform options available, I just don't see why big companies pick these closed formats. Sure, I don't expect them to make a player for every single OS in use, but at least use one of the open formats out there. Then at least we can code our own players.
Do these guys want our business or not?
*sigh*
Ben
The post above should have been moderated UP. The WMA format has already been cracked [hunt for unf**k.exe at google]. Reverse engineering for compatibility purposes is legal, and XMMS already has a very strong plugin architecture. Furthermore, WMAs are based on ASFs, which is more of an open standard than real... which has previously been reverse engineered successfully by the winamp-ra plugin people.
.dll via wine, under XMMS. Why not do the same with MSs encoder?
Even if we can't reverse engineer it, there's another alternative: A VQF plugin was recently released which simply used Yamaha's Windows
There's currently a plugin competition over at XMMS.org. Already someone's built an AAC decoder [AAC is semi-MP4]...
The price of Reals backend software right now is extraordinary comapared to Windows Media. Shoutcast can compete on price but not on bandwidth. WMA will be an unfortunate part of the future...
Coders, earn the respect of your peers, the admiration of Linux users everywhere, and some prizes to boot. Write a WMA client for XMMS!
Cmon - we have the technology. Let's do it!