
BBC Ends Its Use of RealMedia for Streaming Audio - rg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2009/10/realmedia_an_update.shtml
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rbranson
RealMedia: only second to Internet Explorer as the most annoying Internet
software ever.

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catzaa
RealMedia is worse than Internet Explorer. I downloaded RealPlayer SP. It
turns out that it can't even play some old realplayer files.

And a few months later it said that "This version of real player has expired".
MPlayer plays Real video files better than RealPlayer.

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Dilpil
It is about time. RealMedia is one of the most customer abusive companies I
have ever dealt with.

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DarkShikari
It's far worse than you can possibly imagine.

I have a friend who a while back wanted to make an iPhone app that could play
streaming music from various websites (for formats and protocols the iPhone
couldn't natively handle). Everything was looking good until they went to talk
to Real.

Real didn't even have an implementation for their platform, so like everyone
else sane, they simply used the open source libavcodec, from the ffmpeg
project, to decode the audio formats they needed (Real, Windows Media, etc).
But they figured that since Real Audio is a completely proprietary format, it
would be best to get a license from Real anyways.

So they call up Real and ask for a license and so forth. Everything's going
great until the guy asks them about the software they'll be using...

... upon which point the guy goes into an almost murderous rampage about how
ffmpeg is "stealing the code" and basically tells them that if they _use
ffmpeg at all, anywhere in their company_ , Real won't license to them.

And why? Because ffmpeg-- _legally_ \--reverse-engineered Real Audio and Real
Video. The latter of which was the primary point of contention--and the great
irony of it all is that Real Video itself is actually a blatant ripoff of
H.264, and most of the "reverse engineering" consisted of reading early
(publicly available!) drafts of the specification.

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elblanco
My goodness, did anyone still use RealMedia? Welcome back to 1998.

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mahmud
All multimedia websites in Arabic stream crap in Real, except for al-Jazeera.

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electromagnetic
I doubt that could be used as proof that al-Jazeera isn't evil outside of tech
circles.

Obviously the common person doesn't understand that Real is about as evil as
Nazi Zombies as they still willingly use it, despite it being crammed full of
spyware/adware and since I stopped using it (about 10 minutes after I started
using it over a decade ago) probably malware too.

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martingordon
There was a time where RealPlayer was better than Windows Media Player. I
switched to the Mac and stopped using both before I found out if that ever
changed.

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electromagnetic
Generally now almost everyone uses Media Player Classic if they're in a tech
circle. Ironically with the right codecs it can play media smoothly from
almost any format. It even lets me push 1080p without killing my processor.

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adrinavarro
Oh, I'm happy!

By the way, last time I used RealMedia was when I had a desktop computer...
back in 2002-2003, I think. Windows 98, then ME, then 2000... still remember
RealMedia sitting there.. AGH, pure advertising and crappy software.

... Have they ever done something good for humanity? ... At least they were
good at marketing.

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mtrimpe
Their first version kicked ass, for that time. I wrote some stuff using
RealPlayer around 1996 and it was truly amazing to have audio content
compressed into file sizes that were actually acceptable for the early dial-up
modems.

Remember that this was back in the time hand-optimizing GIF's was still an
appropriate thing to do.

I guess that after their first version some business guys took over and ran
the company into the ground, which is a shame ...

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jrockway
Uh, and the replacement is Windows Media and Flash? I don't see any advantage.

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Tichy
Have you ever installed RealPlayer?

