Real Problems 481
Universal Nerd writes "Could Real be its own downfall? According to 'Find the Download in a Haystack', it could be. The difficulty folks have in reaching the free version of RealPlayer is forcing Minnesota Public Radio to look towards Windows Media Player as an alternative. I prefer good old MP3 or OGG streaming like the feeds offered at WCPE but I'm sure no 'serious' company would consider it because they don't have their digital rights preserved." See the CarTalk story from yesterday.
Good... down with Real (Score:5, Insightful)
The message here for Real should be really simple. Make your player as easy to get as possible. Require two clicks to download. Content is King. Annoying software is not. Give me a real reason to register. Look at how sites like slashdot and fileplanet work.
Rights preserved? (Score:5, Insightful)
OGG/MP3 do not remove your rights. Lets me clear.
That people copy (and it's easy with Real and WMP - play it out through line out and record it in whatever you wish) mp3/ogg does not affect "their rights"
Is Real their own problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think not being able to find the download link was the best part about it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the best of advice, and the worst of advice (Score:4, Insightful)
idiotic that mp3 is not used... (Score:3, Insightful)
and somepne please explain to me the justification of "preserving digital rights" on a freely downloaded mp3??? that's like a sales flyer maker getting pissed that someone is taking the flyer he made for a special sale and bitching that someone made 100 copies of his sales flyer and gave them to other people... What? you dont want free redistribution and promotion??? that is plain silly..
shoutcast works great, and is damned cheap to host/ licensing fees....
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM shouldn't matter for Public Radio! (Score:3, Insightful)
This argument is rubbish. Anything you can stream you can record (using Audacity or similar) and save; for that matter, anything broadcast over the airwaves you can record.
Ultimately any form of broadcast/webcast can be converted to mp3/ogg with very little work. NPR should do everyone a service (that's why they're around, to do a public service) and just give us the mp3's/oggs.
Absolutely. (Score:3, Insightful)
Their product was good up to and including RealPlayer G2. But now it sucks. And their product sucking has nothing to do with Microsoft. It has to do with being managed by people who do not understand what the users want.
Not just that... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason I still suffer with RealPlayer in any form is MIT's OpenCourseware. The RealPlayer client has always been a PITA and Real has always been it's own worst enemy. They had more than half a decade of opportunity. Microsoft's Media Player has done nothing exceptional; just suck a lot less.
The whole streaming audio/video field's gone crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
And then, in the virtually ignored fourth corner, we have the stuff that isn't totally assraped by big (or not so big, in Real's case) corporations. MP3. Ogg. Freaking gzipped
No, we have two choices: (1) Run Windows and/or Mac OS X and download some spyware-riddled bloatware from Apple, Real (ugh) or Microsoft (DOUBLE ugh), or (2) run any other OS and use a probably-illegal tool like MPlayer. (Oh, MPlayer isn't illegal, you say? Who the hell are you kidding? At the first nastygram from any big patent-wielding corporation, MPlayer's going bye-bye. As far as I'm concerned, thanks to our pal the DMCA, it's just another DeCSS waiting to happen.)
This is FREAKING RIDICULOUS. Who benefits from any of this? It doesn't even seem as if MS and Apple benefit. Certainly, the "consumer" slash "end-user" slash "listener" doesn't.
This is fucking asinine. I am getting truly disgusted by all of this ridiculous pushing of proprietary standards. SCREW THIS. What will happen in 20 years when someone needs to open a
Audiovisual works are our cultural legacy. And we're blindly allowing corporations to seal up the standards used to encode these works to digital form. What the fuck is our problem? "Consumer groups" and publications like Consumer Reports should be screaming for open standards... but they don't even know or care what the problem is... Nor will they until around 2010 or so, when they try to play their old files and find that they can't...
Imagine if Gutenberg's printing press was available only on license from Gutenberg Ltd., and that everything it printed used a special ink completely invisible unless you wear the patented Gutenberg Glasses(R), available for a MERE sum of 10 shillings. Think that sounds ridiculous? We're doing the very same thing today. Eventually, "dead tree" media will die, and the media used to replace it will be completely corporate-controlled, proprietary, and
Shout louder, SHOUT LOUDER, **SHOUT LOUDER** (Score:5, Insightful)
When my son was three years old, he used to act the same way. If you didn't pay attention to him, he thought the answer was to yell. Or pester. Or throw a tantrum.
My three-year-old was wrong.
Re:version 10 for OS X? (Score:1, Insightful)
The only streaming media player that works, without popping up ads, without asking for a credit card number, without a time-delay nagscreen, is.... Windows Media Player.
And when it dominates streaming content, watch Real and Apple and Vivo - or whoever else exists - cry foul and sue MS about it.
Re:Rights preserved? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ogg and MP3 don't put up any barriers between the honest person that might want to give the application to 100 of their buddies as do items like Real, WMP and Fairplay encoded AACs.
After talking with a friend at Apple that had his hand in the iPod project (along with most other higher level projects there), I asked about the security on the iPods (the hidden directory where the files are stored) and the fact you couldn't easily transfer files -- but it was possible, his response was that it was never designed to be impossible -- it was designed to be a hinderance so that those that did it *KNEW* they were doing something they needed to think about as opposed to being something you could do without a second thought.
No, Ogg and MP3 do not affect their rights, but at the same time it does nothing to assert the rights. Its the same as a copyright statement on a webpage (notice USDN has one on this site), you don't need it, but it asserts you rights a little more.
Most decent companies are not interested in protecting their data against all odds, they are interested in protecting their data so that those that do go out of their was to redistribute it against their wishes does so knowingly of what they are doing.
Re:Is the wording legal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, I give (Score:2, Insightful)
Accepting this fact will let them move on to a business model that uses copying and free distribution to make a profit.
Perhaps shameless "Wayne's World" style product placement?
Perhaps old early TV style adds done by the personalities?
Then tell your advertisers, "we had X downloads and our projections say they will share it Y number of times."
"Now pay us for X+Y viewers."
Re:Is Real their own problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah yeah yeah. Real sucked. We've all heard it, and we all know it.
What is more interesting is the recent drive to improve their image by making their software less obnoxious. Has it worked? Have they improved. If so, isn't it better to congratulate them and talk them up a bit, thereby encouraging further moves towards being reputable instead of still treating them like a leper not much better than some sneaky ad-ware merchant (however deserved in the past).
Re:The whole streaming audio/video field's gone cr (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the US legal system is owned by big corporations doesn't mean the rest of the planet is in the same mess as the US. I see no credible threat to my use of mplayer. I don't live in the US and I didn't download it from the US and for that matter, it wasn't developed in the US.
The rest of your comments seemed sensible.
You Will (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah, then go "uninstall" it. That will appear to remove it. Then later you'll get Message Center popups.
Then go remove any reference to Real from HLMS\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. You'll still periodically see crap.
Re:version 10 for OS X? (Score:4, Insightful)
QTSS is the only one that's free TO stream. And it's also available as open source (Darwin Streaming Server). And it broadcasts standard MPEG-4, so you can watch it in any MPEG-4 compliant player (e.g. Linux), genius. By far the most open and standard format.
Its sad when Public Radio doesn't use Free Softwar (Score:1, Insightful)
Not flame (Score:5, Insightful)
Most folks don't read web pages anymore. They look at the bright and shiny widget graphics and click away, click click click until they are "Somewhere They Don't Want to Be" TM or can't figure out where they missed the boat. As it sits now, hit up real.com and you are literally two clicks away from downloading the free player. I think I installed it a few days ago before this news item hit, and believe it was three or four, but still no big deal. Now, had I not read the links I was clicking, or clicked blazing MEDIA PLAYER graphics that were on display I'm sure I would have gone down a more difficult path, and cause me many more clicks to get the free one.
Remember, it's Real's right to sell their premium player. We don't have to like it, and we don't have to buy it. Frankly, I'm surprised they even still offer a free version. They can set their site up however they want to encourage downloaders to buy the premium player as opposed to the freebie. I've visited sites that offer free applications and have done a much better job of hiding the goodies behind the curtain than real.com.
And to say they shouldn't sell their application at all and just subsidize it's expense off the greenbacks of the server side applications is just crazy. Even the free player is more than a simple "viewer" that other companies give away (Adobe, Crystal Reports, Microsoft). It's an actual full blown application. The premium player also offers content that costs money.
That's precisely the issue! (Score:2, Insightful)
FM isn't "preserving their rights" either (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:version 10 for OS X? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mac version is positively polite IMHO and lacks all the message centre horror.
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:3, Insightful)
Stream it with multicast? Great, I'll be all over it.
Multicast? Are you sure? For this to be advantageous, basically everyone has to watch the stream at the same time. To stream to different users at different times (which is usually the case) then you're basically talking about unicast again, which is the current model.
Furthermore, a lot of network hardware doesn't handle multicast well. For example, the majority of network switches treat IP Multicast packets as broadcast, because they don't do IGMP snooping, so they don't know who is part of the session. So if you're watching a streamed session, everyone on your LAN segment is getting flooded.
'Find the Download in a Haystack' eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't find the Linux download in the hastack for Windows Media or Quciktime. Real: 1, MS, Apple: 0.
it's their own fault (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Buffering.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:FM isn't "preserving their rights" either (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:4, Insightful)
What you say is true, although we could quibble and say that by phoning home, the user's IP address and the fact he is using the software is transmitted, data that might be used against him if the software were, for instance, limited shareware or "box ware" (that is, not distributed over the 'net, but in a box).
Still, sure, phoning home to check for updates probably is innocuous. But how does a user really know what's being transmitted when the software phones home (without attaching a packet sniffer)?
It is just because any sort of phoning home can be mis-construed that I left it out of my latest freeware application. I very much wanted to use phoning home to get a idea of how much my software was being used, and I could have provided users with additional functionality via phoning home.
But I decided that the possibility of mis-perception -- especially in the case of this particular piece of software, which required, in order to be useful at all, the user to enter his password for a service not affiliated with me, which my software would pass on to that service --made it unfriendly to include phoning home.
Unfriendly, because it would arouse in some minority of users fears that my software was doing untoward things, and would induce some portion of those to not use my software at all -- and I didn't want to lock anyone out, even those with merely speculative fears.
Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)
But enough with them - Real has always been the worst offender here. And I'm not suggesting they're bad people, just stupid.
Real could have been a contender, but they couldn't decide on a business model - sell client or sell server - so decided to try selling both. You just can't do that - you have to get one, and use it to get the other.
Maybe have a sideline selling a fancy client, but your bread and butter is getting your client installed everywhere and then milking content providers. Look at the success of MacroMedia. They made it "dead easy" to install Flash, and it pretty much just isn't an issue for most users. Their good plan, and decent software, means they're making money.
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:3, Insightful)
everyone has to watch the stream at the same time
Or you can kick off a new stream every MINUTE and have 60 streams leaving your place (presuming there are listeners for each stream - if not, you only have $NumberListeners streams going out).
So 60 streams of something popular where unicast would create, say, 1000 streams (one per user). Or more.
a lot of network hardware doesn't handle multicast well
Then it's broken. I don't have lots of sympathy for those that implement part of TCP. Windows machines are notorious for not acting on (TCP) windowsize-smallen ICMP requests. Its broken. I'm not going to change how I implement TCP because someone's stack is broken.
It's not like Multicast is new. Or a poor idea.
Re:Good... down with Real (Score:2, Insightful)