Er, the story is no bigger than any other story, and this is also on the frontpage of, for example, cnn.com. You'll probably hear about it on your local news, too, if you're foolish enough to watch it. I hardly think that Slashdot bears the full brunt of the blame for that.
Actually, it's not true, and never was. There has ALWAYS been the option for Real content providers to host their content on plain old http servers
Yes, I'm aware of that, and perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier. The problem is that nowadays virtually nobody is actually providing HTTP links to realmedia, which creates something of a problem. I was referring to the vast majority of sites who only make their content available via RTSP, which is basically the de facto standard. I do have a bunch of realmedia on my HD from places that have allowed HTTP access, but those are few and far between nowadays.
Of course, any data that's coming in to your machine's NIC is inherently saveable to your hard drive. The question remains one of being able to use the data that you've got.
It's not too bad for quicktime, even when they don't give you a "direct" download link, because you can just scrape the.mov files for strings and generally end up at an http URL which points at the actual movie. Downloading ASFs and WMVs is generally possible if you're using asfrecorder or something along those lines. In those cases, the resulting file from your HD will be a fully-playable version provided you've got the right codecs installed, etc.
(Note: I'm about to relate my experiences with trying to save realmedia on my HD in a useful format, and some of this info may not be 100% correct, so take it with a grain of salt.) I've also had some success getting the occasional realmedia file saved onto a hard drive. I've been able to do so with some degree of sucecss for audio files, too. The issue with RealMedia in general though is that it's generally designed from the ground up as a streaming protocol.
If you just take the data coming in from a server, you're not going to get the master file back. For one, the audio and video streams come across as seperate, er, streams. So if you manage to get both of those, you're going to have to find a way to combine them (not impossible, just much more difficult). There's also a lot of back-and-forth that goes on between the RealPlayer client and the server, which results in a variable bitrate as you move through the file. The communication between the server and client which determine these changes comes across as part of the streams that you're otherwise trying to save to the drive, and they're not really valid parts of the realmedia file itself. So if you don't take care to strip out these messages, you'll end up with a file that you can't play.
There's also the issue of keeping the audio and video in sync as you do the combining, which can be problematic because I believe the syncing is done primarily at the server/client communication level (I get the impression that for streaming realmedia you don't really get indexes coming across the connection). Once you do have something on disk, I've had some real difficulties getting it to play back in anything, be it the RealPlayer client itself or mplayer.
Now, again, of course, it's theoretically possible to get all this stuff to work. It is, after all, just a bunch of 1s and 0s. In my experience, though, streaming realmedia files are structured very differently from other kinds of media which get "streamed" in a far less complicated manner. (Though, of course, this only applies to the streaming realmedia formats. Some places do end up having just a.ram file on http which contains the whole media file, and that will generally play just fine. Other times I've seen the kind of URL redirection like you see with Quicktime files. When there's a file sitting behind some streamers, though, it gets very complicated.
Yeah, I got that message too when installing on Windows. I just hit "cancel" and it never bothered me again, though. I suppose it's set up a little deceptively, but it's easy enough to get out of.
I guess there's some weird redirections going on there, then. Perhaps it's cause you're in the UK? (I see the "uk.real.com" in there.) Going to real.com from the states, at least, brings me right to a "Download realplayer" button which starts the download right off, no extra clicking required.
I think at some point, a brave label or two will band together, open their own store, and just offer raw 160+kbps mp3s for something cheap
It looks like that's already starting to happen, hopefully the trend will continue: my comment on that (from the same thread actually).
TMBG is doing 256Kbps (not sure about the other bands using Backoffice), Bleep is at VBR (up to 320), I'm not sure what emusic is doing now (back in The Day they were 128, but I know they've gone up since then).
RealPlayer 10 for Linux is a completely stripped-down version based on gtk2 which contains no extra bloat or spyware (that I've seen anyway). The windows version seems to come with the usual kind of embedded-browser-in-my-media-player bloat, but that's easy to disable, and regardless it doesn't install anything but the actual RealPlayer.
RP10 for Linux is honestly really nice. It's got a very minimal GUI, it's quite snappy, and in general they've addressed most of the points that Linux users have had over the years. Basically the only one that I can see remaining is that you still can't "Save as..." on any realmedia. Oh, and there's still the "send connection-quality data to Real" option which you can disable if you want. The new release was pretty much geared towards Linux users who had been fed up with RealPlayers of years past.
sort of like how setting up a firewall with XP (pre sp-2) is a matter of clicking a few options?
That's not an applicable analogy at all. Setting up a firewall is a complicated task requiring a lot of forethought and planning. There's nothing complicated about deselecting "send info. to RealNetworks."
Regardless, if I WANT spyware or some BS process poping up info, I'll find the options to turn it ON. Don't force me to poke around for ways to turn the garbage off.
I agree that in an ideal world they wouldn't have that stuff in there at all, but the point is that it *is* quite trivial to turn it off. I guess I don't mind because as a matter of habit I always go through all the options whenever I install new software anyway, so deselecing some options in RealPlayer doesn't bug me.
And if Real did fix those "issues" I'd never know it. I installed RP once. I will never do so again. They are not to be trusted.
Once evil, always evil? Do you apply that logic to everything, or is it just companies who get the brunt of that philosophy?
I dunno, I just went into vmware and installed the windows version, it wasn't bad. Double-click -> Accept -> Select Speed -> deselect some checkboxes -> deselect some more checkboxes -> "cancel" -> exit
Granted, from there there's a few more steps to having a decent player: close the bottom pane, view->show related info. And then a couple of options deselected from Connection->Internet/Privacy and Automatic Services->AutoUpdate. So I'll admit that there's still some stuff to disable, and it's not quite as user-friendly as the Linux version.
But still, once I've done that, I've got a nice clean player. I guess I'm glad that I've got the Linux version though. Meh.
I agree that the major labels certainly won't go for straight MP3, at least not for time time being, but there are some encouraging trends going on with some labels/bands who seem to "get it."
and the fact they tried to hide options to disable said behaviour in their software
What exactly was hidden? I remember some unpleasant behavior in older RealPlayer versions, but turning those behaviors off was never more than going into the options screen and knowing which tabs to click on.
How has any of that changed?
A fairly good argument to be made is that, in fact, RealPlayer 10 has addressed most of the issues present with older RP versions.
1. It's more than one click away from the main website.
How many clicks does it take for you to click "Download" on www.real.com?
2. It tries to take over your system as a default media system and sign you up for all kinds of spam on install.
The RealPlayer available by clicking on that link I mentioned does none of these things. (Though I admit I haven't installed the Windows version)
3. It's BUTT ugly. It looks like the rejects from the XP UI team were hired to design it, when the rejects from the QuickTime UI team would have been a better choice.
Since you're obviously not familiar with what's been happening recently at Real, I should point out that the RealPlayer available at said link uses a different GUI than the previous versions.
4. I can't DL the content of RealMedia, like I can with mpeg or quickTime.
This is still true, of course.
5. It's a bit [buffering 10%] too eager [buffering 25%] to send media [buffering 40%] before it's [buffering 75%] ready. And scrubbing [buffering 85%] is nearly [buffering 95%] impossible.
I haven't had this problem on the new version, though I never really had any problems with it for the past few versions of RP either. I've just got a standard DSL line. Perhaps you've just got a sucky connection.
WHEN are you going to fix these OBVIOUS deficiencies that have plagued the player for YEARS?
When are you going to check to make sure you're not posting outdated information that's no longer true?
... a nice, optical, USB-based mouse with three distinct buttons, none of which are a scrollwheel? I don't care if there is a scrollwheel somewhere on the mouse, just don't take away my middle button to do it! I know that it's technically possible to use the scrollwheel as a button by pressing down on it without scrolling, but on every mouse I've tried with a scrollwheel, doing so is an infuriating process of having your pages scroll all over the place while you try to use the middle button. Even worse is when you're used to using all three buttons on an FPS or the like.
The Perfit Mouse Optical is perfect really, with three nice full size buttons and a scrollwheel on the side for the thumb, so I can still use a scrollwheel, but it's just waaay out of my price range for a mouse.
It should be pointed out that Qt actually doesn't have anything to do with KDE, other than KDE elected to use Qt as its base. Qt can be installed perfectly fine with no other KDE components, and there's plenty of other software that relies on only Qt, and no KDE components.
KDE is probably the most "well-known" application which uses Qt, and so they're associated together in many people's minds, but Qt doesn't depend on one inch of KDE.
Er, I know. That's why I was asking what the ultimate example would be. Using "penultimate" doesn't make sense unless you've got something else to compare against. I think it's pretty clear that the poster's intent was to imply that embryonic stem cell restrictions are the height of stupidity, perhaps you disagree.
Haven't looked at pricing lately, but perhaps AOL is cheaper dialup than you can get otherwise, and if broadband isn't available for whatever reason, it may make financial sense to do so. Or not, like I said, I don't know what AOL costs.
Man, now I totally want a bumper sticker which reads, "Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix." That's too damn funny. Perhaps thinkgeek will come out with one.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, the story is no bigger than any other story, and this is also on the frontpage of, for example, cnn.com. You'll probably hear about it on your local news, too, if you're foolish enough to watch it. I hardly think that Slashdot bears the full brunt of the blame for that.
Huh, very strange. In the states on my vmware running win2k it lets me right at the download. Apparently not all REMOTE_ADDRs are created equal...
It's not too bad for quicktime, even when they don't give you a "direct" download link, because you can just scrape the .mov files for strings and generally end up at an http URL which points at the actual movie. Downloading ASFs and WMVs is generally possible if you're using asfrecorder or something along those lines. In those cases, the resulting file from your HD will be a fully-playable version provided you've got the right codecs installed, etc.
(Note: I'm about to relate my experiences with trying to save realmedia on my HD in a useful format, and some of this info may not be 100% correct, so take it with a grain of salt.) I've also had some success getting the occasional realmedia file saved onto a hard drive. I've been able to do so with some degree of sucecss for audio files, too. The issue with RealMedia in general though is that it's generally designed from the ground up as a streaming protocol.
If you just take the data coming in from a server, you're not going to get the master file back. For one, the audio and video streams come across as seperate, er, streams. So if you manage to get both of those, you're going to have to find a way to combine them (not impossible, just much more difficult). There's also a lot of back-and-forth that goes on between the RealPlayer client and the server, which results in a variable bitrate as you move through the file. The communication between the server and client which determine these changes comes across as part of the streams that you're otherwise trying to save to the drive, and they're not really valid parts of the realmedia file itself. So if you don't take care to strip out these messages, you'll end up with a file that you can't play.
There's also the issue of keeping the audio and video in sync as you do the combining, which can be problematic because I believe the syncing is done primarily at the server/client communication level (I get the impression that for streaming realmedia you don't really get indexes coming across the connection). Once you do have something on disk, I've had some real difficulties getting it to play back in anything, be it the RealPlayer client itself or mplayer.
Now, again, of course, it's theoretically possible to get all this stuff to work. It is, after all, just a bunch of 1s and 0s. In my experience, though, streaming realmedia files are structured very differently from other kinds of media which get "streamed" in a far less complicated manner. (Though, of course, this only applies to the streaming realmedia formats. Some places do end up having just a .ram file on http which contains the whole media file, and that will generally play just fine. Other times I've seen the kind of URL redirection like you see with Quicktime files. When there's a file sitting behind some streamers, though, it gets very complicated.
TMBG is doing 256Kbps (not sure about the other bands using Backoffice), Bleep is at VBR (up to 320), I'm not sure what emusic is doing now (back in The Day they were 128, but I know they've gone up since then).
RP10 for Linux is honestly really nice. It's got a very minimal GUI, it's quite snappy, and in general they've addressed most of the points that Linux users have had over the years. Basically the only one that I can see remaining is that you still can't "Save as..." on any realmedia. Oh, and there's still the "send connection-quality data to Real" option which you can disable if you want. The new release was pretty much geared towards Linux users who had been fed up with RealPlayers of years past.
From Linux: Go to www.real.com, click on "Download RealPlayer." (file starts downloading)
From Windows: Go to www.real.com (different page comes up), click on "Download RealPlayer free." (file starts downloading)
If you're not getting either of those frontpages, I wouldn't know how to help you.
Granted, from there there's a few more steps to having a decent player: close the bottom pane, view->show related info. And then a couple of options deselected from Connection->Internet/Privacy and Automatic Services->AutoUpdate. So I'll admit that there's still some stuff to disable, and it's not quite as user-friendly as the Linux version.
But still, once I've done that, I've got a nice clean player. I guess I'm glad that I've got the Linux version though. Meh.
- bleep.com (Warp Records)
- They Might be Giants (and Back Office Music, the place which created their store)
- Even though their subscription levels kind of suck now, emusic.com.
So, certainly no BMI groups in there, or anything, but here's hoping that it'll trickle up a bit...Er, they have. RealPlayer 10 for Linux is a simple stripped-down client, and doesn't install anything else. I've had it installed for some time now.
The Perfit Mouse Optical is perfect really, with three nice full size buttons and a scrollwheel on the side for the thumb, so I can still use a scrollwheel, but it's just waaay out of my price range for a mouse.
KDE is probably the most "well-known" application which uses Qt, and so they're associated together in many people's minds, but Qt doesn't depend on one inch of KDE.
Aah, thought you were calling me the pedant due to my grammatical quibblings. Nevermind then. :)
Well, there we have it I guess. As I said, I had no idea what it cost.
Haven't looked at pricing lately, but perhaps AOL is cheaper dialup than you can get otherwise, and if broadband isn't available for whatever reason, it may make financial sense to do so. Or not, like I said, I don't know what AOL costs.
Man, now I totally want a bumper sticker which reads, "Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix." That's too damn funny. Perhaps thinkgeek will come out with one.