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Music Media

RealNetworks buys Xing 46

Posted by Hemos from the time-to-rock-and-roll dept.
Keith Russell writes "Caught this on ZDNet. RealNetworks is buying the Xing Corp. for ~$75M in stock. Looks like Real and IBM are gearing up for a fight with Microsoft over digital audio. " True-combine this with the IBM partnership and Microsoft's announcements about digital vidoe-things are about to get messy.
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RealNetworks buys Xing More

RealNetworks buys Xing

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  • Maybe Real will improve something.

    They can start by producing a FakeAudio player that runs from the console, so I don't have to waste n million colours that I don't have on my X display just to play a radio broadcast...

    Talk about chasing a user into the arms of Nullsoft. Of course, I'm probably the only one who's using monochrome X anyway.

  • An alternative to using the fix or waiting for Real to get G2 working for us is to use ALSA. RealPlayer with ALSA and 2.2.5 works just fine for me here.
  • They did well with the tape-based Walkman way back when...many expect them to do well with their new portable digital audio playback "Walkman".

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • Posted by spacepig:

    Apple is supposed to have one of their product announcement conferences on the 19th of this month. Everyone's expecting quicktime 4, which will support live streaming of audio and video. I don't see how real expects to compete with a vastly superior technology, widely deployed, that requires very little server overhead. A mac os x server is needed to serve LIVE video and audio, but prerecorded content can be hosted on ANY server, and it will "just stream". Also, if you want proof, goto http://quicktime.apple.com. Check out the examples of the qdesign codec. Very high quality audio that starts playing almost immediately on a 56K connection, and loads faster than it plays! Also, quicktime supports 3d technologies, interactive panoramas, and (few people are aware) a more or less complete toolbox. Entire cross platform apps can basically be written using the quicktime toolbox, and it's now ported to java. Pretty crazy stuff!!
  • http://www.xingtech.com /support/extest/mp3/encoder/index.html [xingtech.com]
    Look at this.. they're looking for linux beta testers....
  • Forgive me for being ignorant but I am puzzled about where IBM gets involved in this. Are they a stockholder in RealNetworks or something?

    Which reminds me, some time ago IBM had their own streaming audio and video format, called Bamba. Did they abandon it? (like with so many good IBM technologies...)
  • Instructions for patching rvplayer 5.0 are included in the documentation that comes with the 2.2.x kernel source.
  • Why not a freely available video compression format. Is it that hard to make?

    I did a 10 second avi and got 46 MB. Something tells me this would require hardware to process the bandwidth.
  • MPEG-4 is based around Quicktime technology, as a side note.
  • Privately held stock is different.
  • Actually, that's not off-topic at all. I'm concerned that Real is going to kill off Xing's development of their MP3 encoder for Linux. Xing is currently beta testing their MP3 encoder on both i386 *and* PPC platforms. Real so far has shown a remarkable standoffishness towards Linux. I'm not too happy about this, because in theory this could mean the end of what was looking like a company who had shifted their focus from strictly M$ to more Linux-centric. I dunno.
  • This is a bit off topic, but here goes:

    Is there a good solution for offline RealAudio? What I'd really like to do is slurp down files listed in a .ram (or .rmm) file with something like wget. But the pnm: protocol doesn't work. Is there an offline program that can use this protocol?

    I know one possibility is to redirect /dev/audio to a temporary file while using RealPlayer to "listen" to the files, but this is restricted to the take the full playback time, and worse, to be a full uncompressed audio file. I'd like to save the .ra files directly if possible.

    On a related note, is RealAudioMP3 possible? Are there any utilities for manipulating Real files? Is the RealAudio format open?

  • It's interesting watching dinosaurs fight.
  • Real is probably my least fave company at the moment, outside of the RIAA. Real is playing lackey to the RIAA and its plans to close up the sources for content on the net.

    Talk about a company aspiring to be MSesque this is it.

    Thier buying Xing will be interesting. Can they incorporate mp3 into thier way fo thinking, will crappy sounding RA files bcome MP3s with another extension?
  • Too right - I expected better of IBM, what with their recent open-source moves. Just imagine the press that would have followed an announcement from Big Blue that they were going to be developing MP3 technology...

    Stuart.
  • How do ya get RealAudio to work on 2.2.x kernel?
    I refuse to run NetShow... Will RealAudio ever release the G2 player for Linux?????
  • Xing makes some great products for audio compression. The latest version of AudioCatylist [http] does variable bit rate mp3 compression that produces the best sounding files I've heard. I rip and compress at highest quality, which varies from 384k down, and get files similar in size to 128k and much better sounding. Really the high quality VBR encoding is good stuff.

    I'm sure the aquisition of this encoding technology will be a good thing for Real. I can't wait to listen to NPR on the net and hear the same quality I get on my radio.

  • While they haven't released the G2 player for Linux yet, Real has shown a little more Linux support recently. I don't know if you've tried the new RealProducer G2 for Linux, but it's remarkably solid. It even has a very usable GUI and does capture with video4linux.

    They made one really cool touch in the GUI, FWIW. In the preferences there's an option to output the command line syntax for every command the GUI runs. Very cool for scripting and stuff...

    Don't give up on RealNetworks and Linux yet...

    e;
  • Erm, no.

    Pop your head into the seething pit of hell that is news.admin.net-abuse.email and you'll see that Real have been guilty of sending out email to completely fictional addresses in the hope of hitting a real box.

    I myself have an email sitting in my queue addressed to 'temp', which has never been a correct address, and has never been used by me to register anything. And trust me, I *always* say I don't want email (or use completely fictitious addresses, poor old billg@microsoft.com must be getting hammered :).

    Real have spammed before, apologised for the mess-up, spammed again, apologised again, and are now spamming completely non-Real related junk to the very people they promised they had removed from their lists.

    Until they clean up their act, I won't use their software, it's as simple as that.
  • *sigh* Just as I decided never to give any support to Real over their recent spamming campaign they go and start buying up the competition.

    I'm not a happy bunny.
  • They're working on a Linux version of AudioCatalyst 2.0

    Go to Macintouch [macintouch.com] and scroll down 3/4 of the way.
  • Especially with those memory sticks... Sony developers seem to watch Star Trek for ideas...

    But if Sony can put out a player that can hold more music
    than MP3-Players can store on flash-cards these days they might get
    away with a proprietary format...

    bye,
    cord
    --
  • Ya know...the dummie company I bought my DVD player from gave me Xing DVD software which never worked on the Win side (which just meant I booted into windows even less) and I got them to send me another copy which didn't work. So, I never was a fan. Maybe Real will improve something.
  • I just thought $75M in stocks is pretty cheap...aren't Internet company deals usually measured in Billions of $ In Stocks?
  • I use the Xing encoder for MP3, and it is the fastest mofo I've ever used. (Think 24 seconds to encode a 3-1/2min 128Kbit CD-quality WAV file.)The files are high quality too. Real appearantly did a little research before buying them out. I just hope this means I can still get updates. That's the only thing that worries me with acquisitions.
  • According to an article released at 3:42p ET on CNN [http], they haven't been bought yet and haven't released any official info - so don't jump on the ship quite yet :-)
  • At least on May 14th, when Broadcast 2000 comes out, they won't be looking to real or MS for digital audio.
  • What real/ibm now need is some exclusive content to back things up. Unfortunately Yahoo/Broadcast.com supports both windows media and real media and I wouldn't be surprised if nbc starts to put more web content out in the future and I wouldn't be surprised if it is only available for windows media (due to the whole msnbc thing).

    So where does this leave real/ibm. First of all, they can put add a bit more weight by working more closely with AOL/Netscape/Sun since their also countering the small and squishy company. Second, they need content, and lots of it. Ibm/real seem to have a good head start with audio but video is where the future is. Get working with Apple, Fox and some of the cable networks. A good pilot would be to test out weekly boardcasts of South Part/ Simpsons/ etc. There is already a market there that can be used. And from there, who knows what can happen..
  • and there are _several_ free MPEG codecs available.

    MPEG-1 (ISO-11172) and MPEG-2 (ISO-13818) which cover audio, video and system streams are open standards, and for most parts of it you don't have to pay royalties if you distribute an implementation. (The exception as I understand being MP-3 which really is MPEG-1 Layer III)

    Xing got 'big' by building MPEG codecs.
    Their codecs used to be only partially complaint with the specs, they lacked some major parts in the decode engine which made it (in my opinion) a useless product. Dunno what the current status is, because I think Xing was sorta blown away by far better products,- I lost interest...

    (And YES, the ActiveMovie MPEG software decode is pretty decent,- to bad they don't release source. :o))

    Breace

  • IBM bad at consumer products (Score:3)

    by Cassius ( 9481 ) on Tuesday April 13, 1999 @10:28AM (#1936447)
    With Real in the partnership, maybe they have a chance, but IBM has never been very good at marketing to consumers. In fact, they suck at it.

    Microsoft also has a *bit* of an advantage in the consumer OS market, which is the platform all this stuff depends on.

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