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Yahoo & Broadcast.com Dumping Real Audio for MS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the so-much-for-audio dept.

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.

4 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. ASF specs by harmonica · · Score: 5

    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!

  2. Unfortunate, but Very Understandable by IntelliTubbie · · Score: 5

    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.

  3. What about MPEG and/or QuickTime? by bgarland · · Score: 5

    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.

    ------------------------------------------------ -

    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

  4. A Linux WMA client is VERY feasible by Nailer · · Score: 5

    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.

    Even if we can't reverse engineer it, there's another alternative: A VQF plugin was recently released which simply used Yamaha's Windows .dll via wine, under XMMS. Why not do the same with MSs encoder?

    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!