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.

Re:They should have more screenshots.

[Anonymous Coward]

a menubar playback area and some control buttons, simplicity is a positive. what else is necessary, its a media player. not an organizer etc.

Re:What is this crap?

[enosys]

Don't they at least deserve some credit for not being Microsoft?

Re:Helix Player milestone 2

[glassesmonkey]

I think the link to the windows Real One player should be a *hint* to everyone about what this company is about.. Note: the link is NOT http://realone.com/download/realoneplayer_free.exe but rather a game to trick the average person into going somewhere they did not want to go.

Does anyone think all the recent PR on slashdot in favor of Real (including quotes about having changed their ways and favorable comments from Helix community) is that much different from the clicky trickery just to download the player? It's just more of the same "try our great new player".. You just wait for the other RealOne(TM) shoe to drop.

Mplayer is your friend

[adrianbaugh]

It plays almost everything I need it to play. As of pre3 the exception seems to be realaudio streams (which play but seem to lose sync after a while). I'm sure that'll be sorted out before long though - props to the developers!

Re:Call me a skeptic, but Real...

[joe_bruin]

okay, here it is:
real is getting their ass handed to them in the formats market. divx/xvid/mpeg4 format files are everywhere. quicktime sorenson is thriving in its own nitch. realvideo formats are nowhere except for low end streaming, and that market is drying up.
in the music field, mp3 is the king, but wma and itunes m4a/m4p are catching up. ogg is out there for the geeks. meanwhile, real's audio and drm formats are decaying. their portable strategy is even worse (having sat in on some meetings with them, in a nutshell it is "[insert platform] is not currently supported").
their players are spyware-ridden, buggy (buffering...), and annoying (being a pioneer in the player "skinning disease" that every media player seems to suffer from now). smart users avoid them like the plague, and stupid users, well, they have windows media player already installed.

the only reason to have the real player installed on your machine right now is if there is some real content that you need to see. real's motive here is to make their streaming servers the choice of the geeks. microsoft is edging them out of the streaming server, but the problem is, you need to run windows to serve windows media format streams, and they are not (officially) supported on linux/unix clients. by giving the source (for what, really, a streaming server and client? big deal), they get cross platform compatibility, good pr, some free porting efforts, and a last foothold in their dying market. now, when your boss comes to you and says "we need a streaming video server", will you say "let's put up a winxp machine and stream asf", or will you say "real helix server on one of our linux boxes"?

the fact is, they still suck. but at least now you don't have to rely on their shitty software as much as previously, at least making them a viable option. that's what their up to. whether it succeeds is yet to be determined.

Umm... what about the Grant Program?

[elaineg]

I manage the Helix Community Grant Program, and am really looking forward to working with the grant recipient choices [helixcommunity.org]. However, I am part of a larger team that's trying to effect change w/in Real... part of this effort is sharing the Slashdot community's thoughts with the exec team. Constructive comments are easier to convey than cranky responses about past perceptions. Help us out! We want to build products & release code that is for the greater good. With your support we can make this happen. Start here: what do you think about our Grant Recipient choices [helixcommunity.org]? Have you checked out the Helix Player project [helixcommunity.org], or other projects in the Helix community? [helixcommunity.org], Please advise...