Real Announces Helix Grant Winners

elaineg writes "We're happy to announce the 2003 Helix Community Grant Program winners for development of open source projects on Helix. They are to UC Santa Barbara for providing robust multicast support in Helix, the Justin Karneges and Ulrich Staudinger at the Jabber Foundation for Jabber/Helix integration, Robert Kaye at MusicBrainz for integrated metadata cleanup in the Helix DNA Client, Jesse Schell at Carnegie Mellon University for integrating the Panda3D game and simulation engine with Helix, and the Xiph.org Foundation for further R&D and support of Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora codecs, including Helix DNA platform integration. More details can be found in the press release. Also, in vaguely related news, we've released Milestone 2 of the Helix Player for Linux." Helix styles itself as "the first open multi-format platform for digital media creation, delivery and playback", and has been created by Real Networks.

Its good to see

[HappyCitizen]

That Org Vorbiss R&D is given an award. Its a good format IMO

They should have more screenshots.

[Chuck Chunder]

If this one [helixcommunity.org] is anything to go by it looks like they may have created something better than the old players from hell.

Simply a menu bar, a playback area and some control buttons. Lovely.

What is this crap?

[phr1]

The only important parts of realmedia are the realaudio and realvideo codecs which as far as I know are proprietary. All attempts to integrate open formats like Vorbis into realplayer are only helping spread the disease. Why does anyone think it's interesting? Until the realaudio and realvideo formats are opened, integrating those other formats is just helping Realmedia Corp. co-opt the open formats.

Re:Wow...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Aaww well yes, they do suck, but I also remember a time when they were the only maker of serious software to play video on Linux, and I was really grateful to be able to play realaudio and realvideo files on my then badly supported pet OS.

I guess it's like a moped : when you're a kid, you feel the biggest guy in town on your little buzzing machine, then you get your driver's license and your first car, and your hate the thing for taking up so much space in the garage and stinking the place up with that awful gasoline stench. But remember you once liked it though ...

Re:What is this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are giving you a free player that supports open formats as well as their own. Seems potentially valuable to me even if you don't want their codecs.

Call me a skeptic, but Real...

[Myself]

...must have something up their sleeve. Everything Real has ever done has been user-hostile, with the express aim of taking control of your computer away from you.

Without some absurdly good justification (a new board of directors with Mother Theresa as chairperson?), I can't believe that Real would do anything "open" without an ulterior motive.

What the?

[Chuck Chunder]

You seem to be saying that getting Realmedia to adopt open formats is a bad thing?

Sure, we'd all like all the codecs to be open but in the meantime proprietary+open is better than proprietary alone. Pre-existing proprietary codecs are never going to be opened. Whatever they or we want sorting out all the patents and licences to do so would be an unbelievable amount of effort. You can't just "undo" proprietary development like that.

What we can do however is help Realmedia see the value of Open formats here and now. We can't change their history but we can try and guide their future.

Re:What the?

[ThogScully]

I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I know the general consensus here is that Real is a bad company, but personally, I like being able to listen/watch streams in Linux because my other option is essentially not to listen/watch streams.

I'm glad someone's giving me an option and the fact that they're using open protocol standards also only emphasizes that some websites may now choose that format in the comfort of knowing there is a bigger installed base.
-N

/. conformism wins out over independent thought?

[jensend]

Look- everybody knows Real's mass market players have been horrible for quite some time. However, whenever anybody mentions Helix on /., any rational discussion is drowned out by a horde of people who haven't looked into Helix at all but want to get in their "R3AL I5 T3H 5UX0RZ!" me-too comment. Helix looks like a really solid effort, and the linux player is rather nice. Hopefully management will let them release a Windows port of the helix player as they intend to do.

Re:What is this crap?

[stefanlasiewski]

Until the realaudio and realvideo formats are opened, integrating those other formats is just helping Realmedia Corp. co-opt the open formats.

Of you don't want groups to co-opt your open format, then don't release an open format.

I thought the whole point of open formats to be used?

Totally Lost

[Compenguin]

I'm totally lost here, I've registered all agreed to two seperate licenses but I can't find the source to M2. A little help here.

Re:What the?

[Chuck Chunder]

I'd rather that they either go completely open and be embraced as a standard, or else stay completely proprietary so they can die out as quickly as possible and be replaced by open formats.

And I'd rather travel to work in a flying car, get paid a million dollars for an hours work and drive home to my wives Sarah Michelle Geller and Jennifer Love Hewitt for a bit of nookie.

Unfortunatly I live in the real world.

• Real cannot feasibly open up their closed codecs.
• They cannot simply dump their closed codecs in favour of open ones as they clearly must continue to support existing customers.
• There is no indication that if Real were to die there would be any great migration to open formats. Instead there would be a migration to the only other format that has an existing installation base. Microsoft Media Player.

Real providing access to open formats provides a migration path. It's incredibly hard to get people to switch from one thing to another without one of those.

Re:What the?

[phr1]

I don't see why they can't open the closed codecs. Other companies open formerly closed programs or formats all the time. Even Flash has been opened, fron what I understand (the format, not the Macromedia implementation).

Re:Whither Ogg Theora?

[evilviper]

and Theora's still at "Alpha 2" half-a-year after it was originally scheduled to be "finished"....

Yes, development is going slow, unfortunately, but I'm sure it's not stopped. My main concern is not that it won't get finished (I'm sure it will) but that once it's finally done, it'll be so far behind the curve that nobody will want to use it.

Theora isn't dead. There is Theora support in Xine, MPlayer, and I'm sure other media players.

Personally, I wish they would have just released a Unix VP3.2 encoder/player, instead of wasting a lot of time on trivial improvements. Windows users can use the VP3.2 Quicktime plugin (along with a quicktime Vorbis Plugin) and create patent-free movies, but us Unix folks are left out in the cold.

Re:/. conformism wins out over independent thought

[jsebrech]

"So what?" Who needs Realmedia? There's a new, open-source player? So what? It might be useful for viewing the decaying Real content still out there on the net, but why should we promote the continued use of this crap?

What cross-platform content format would you suggest then? WMV is not an option due to it being windows-only (there's a mac version, but it's been discontinued). Quicktime has no linux version (though you can get it to run through crossover, but performance in that case of horrible). All the other formats are either not available on all platforms, unsuitable for streaming, or too difficult to get running.

Like it or not, in the real world, rm is the ONLY format that will easily play on all the major platforms.

Maybe if ogg theora or ogg tarkin ever get off the ground that will change, but given how ogg vorbis is still a niche player, despite it being a clearly superior and completely open/free format that has been out for quite a while, this seems incredibly unlikely.