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Is there nothing of the Harmony fiasco in the Linux stuff? It would seem that that would be an excellent selling point for their Harmony stuff if it worked inside of linux. The way things are going, I don't think they'll have much luck with it since it's NOT taken well by iPod users so far.

Maybe a stupid question but is there a pay version too? Including plugins for playing wma/wmv and other licensed formats? Don't tell me to install mplayer/xine, they are just hacks which don't work always.

I would love to pay for a version which can play all formats without having 10 different programs ....

That would be nice!
I would add legal DVD playback to that wish list

If you have feature requests for a future version of the player, by all means consider posting to the features requests thread on helixcommunity.org:

https://helixcommunity.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=464&forum_id=6

I have to agree. I used to think RP8 was cantankerous and a kludge. An afterthought and half-hearted attempt at supporting Linux, at best. RP10 feels like a real, native Linux app. The integration into the (I assume) fd.o-standardized menu option was a neat touch. Gtk2 frontend was flawless. I wonder if it's even Gnome HIG compliant because it's rather simple and easy-to-use. I was amazed at the use of the plugin by the BBC website. It seemed to use nothing but web standards to create an interface and Javascript to control the RP10 plugin (no Gtk2 was used for the interface on the website).

Audio was better (less hiss) than RP8. I've yet to try viewing movie trailers since I only know of Apple's quicktime page for viewing trailers. (Hint: Could someone post links to RealVideo pages of movie trailiers?)

You can always go directly to the movies website

i've been running realplayer 10 on my mac for a few months now and its worked flawlessly, hopefully there will be an ebuild waiting for my desktop whenever i get back to it.

i use real player for BBC radio just like the author. i'm glad that they support my three main platforms (though i still wish streaming was possible in BeOS).

I think you hit the nail on the head. A legal media player for Linux would be nice.

If Real needs a market, here it is. Wide open.

As long as the player behaves itself and doesn't bombard us with popups, unwanted "news" and install the kitchen sink behind our backs, I think it could work.

I have been using Real Player 10 and love it. I can finall play the smil protocol. If Real Player is smart about it, Linux could become its platform of choice. Help Linux become accepted by providing awesome multimedia and Linux users will remain loyal to Real.

Hopefully, they'll realize that that is how things are supposed to work.

BTW, installation is even easier for those of us on rpm distributions.

I have some music video's kicking aroud that it just won't play encoded in mpeg2, xine does it all fine, RP10 don't want to know Other than that, its a nice compact media player that doesn't look strangely out of place.

When installing it on Linux does it also ask if you want to add free news, free commercials, free desktop icons for free products, some more icons for some extra products, some statistic and preference sending to some server, integration of free offers toolbar in your browser, set home page to one with more offers and products, and opt-in for info on some products?

The gtk interface looks nice. Still, why was gtk chosen and not qt? gtk may run on Windows and it may also be GPL on Windows but why run gtk on Windows when Windows native ui exists (assuming it does also for version 10 of realplayer)?

That's simple: in case they want to go binary only. gtk+ is lgpl, so you can make an open version or a closed source version without having to pay anyone. With qt, you can go closed source, but you have to pay trolltech.

Like you say, the interface looks nice, so why would they bother?

GTK is also on Solaris systems now, and I don't think qt is, it's just easier to have a free toolkit that works across the board.

It is just a rebadged helix player + real stuff.

I think others are working a qt front-end to helix player.

Check the helix player web site.
----snip----

On Windows Real has had a lot of competition. But if they have a for pay version for linux with only the features mentioned by others above. Then I can see myself purchasing it.

I opened a thread about a pay version, please react on the following url.

http://helixcommunity.org/forum/message.php?msg_id=1837

Well, I used to hate all Real software with a passion, but this does definitely look 'Real'ly nice

I'll have to try it as well.

...that the best version of RealPlayer is the Linux version. I had to give up on RealPlayer for Windows, it was pretty ugly (too much custom graphics and branding) and had a tendency to completely freeze the PC when playing some videos - stuff from IFilm always caused this problem.

I think I read somewhere that some of the distros (possibly Novell/SuSE) will be standardising on RealPlayer as the default media player, or video player at the very least.

GTK is also on Solaris systems now, and I don't think qt is, it's just easier to have a free toolkit that works across the board.

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qt sure is on solaris. they even offer kde on one of the extra cd's

"I think you hit the nail on the head. A legal media player for Linux would be nice. "

you mean a legal player for playing proprietary formats where there are software patents like in the USA. lets be clear about this.

In reply to Mike: no, it does not.

Last time i looked at helix player, it had very impressive gui, but played only .oggs and .gifs (not even flac or mp3).

And anyway, i beleive MPlayer can play more than realplayer10.

(Not to mention asking to specify oggvorbis sdk path (/usr:) and failing silently if no theora was installed).

n00b questions:
1) someone said that helix may be providing a Qt based player, any idea when?
2) SUSE are a KDE/Qt focused distro, would any packaged helix player therefore wait until said Qt version of helix were available?
offtopic:
3) anyone know when SUSE will package a DVD/media player into a distro?
cheers

Will do the deed tonight if it rains (= no street skating in London). So it does play quicktime right ?

Can it also rip and burn CDs ? Only joking.

If I had any C++ skills (well awesome would be better) I'd try to integrate Juk, k3b and Noatune via kparts to get the real thing.

Given that Helix is an OSS project, why hasn't it been released for Windows without the Real codec? I'd consider running that.

Hello, I installed RP10 and it worked nicely. But when I recompiled my custom kernel on which I disabled Alsa OSS emulation (Old OSS was already turned off), I had no more sound!

Is there a way make the sound work with pure ALSA and no OSS emulation?

And how can I get the list of all internet radios available?

Still doesn't launch on a debian woody distro, too bad have to stay with RP8 but mplayer does the job quite nicely.

Too bad the linked the app with too new libraries...

No there is no way to do it with ALSA only, this is one of my major complaints about RP10.

"And how can I get the list of all internet radios available?"

Please...don't be silly

Yanik

<clip>
When installing it on Linux does it also ask if you want to add free news, free commercials, free desktop icons for free products, some more icons for some extra products, some statistic and preference sending to some server, integration of free offers toolbar in your browser, set home page to one with more offers and products, and opt-in for info on some products?
</clip>

ANSWER: No, no, no, no, no, no, no & no... Think that answers all of these questions. Amazing that there is none of that junk in RP10 linux. Does not even ask for your email anymore - takes the fun out of making up some bogus address.

I certainly have no desire for a pay version. Between xine and mplayer, I watch whatever I want to watch.

I downloaded and installed the new RP. I came upon it by accident and wondered why there hadn't been an announcement about it. So far so good. I still had RP8 on my system so I changed my symlinks in /usr/bin to point to the new install. But so far listening to broadcasts have been great. Was concerned at first as the sound from Radio Scotland was real tinny. But apparently it was just a one time problem.

Only problem is that it's 32bits only no 64 bits version for my dear new amd64...

I downloaded the RPM from http://real.com/linux and installed it on my Sun Java Desktop System (SuSE Linux underneath) and it worked out of the box perfectly.

Now wheres the Solaris version so that I don't need to run this under Janus on Solaris 10....

I, too, was hesitant to install the new RP10 package, especially after seeing the absolute crap that is RealOne for Windows.

Shame on me for not having faith in the community. Helix / RP10 is just another victory for the open source community. It's small, it's fast, it does everything you'd expect it to. It sounds great and SureStream works really nicely against bandwidth issues.

Since moving to Linux almost exclusively (not the laptop, yet) a year ago May, I've shirked Windows Media altogether, which has left me with generally no choice but to use Real. At first, I was very reluctant, but having used RP8 for some time, and having it work well enough, and now moving to RP10, Real has pretty much convinced me they're interested in changing their ways.

Cheers to that Now I have to go donate to my local NPR station to make sure they keep the Real stream up on their site!!

anyone plug-ins for mp3 playlist?

I think I read somewhere that some of the distros (possibly Novell/SuSE) will be standardising on RealPlayer as the default media player, or video player at the very least.
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redhat and novell probably will include helix player not real player. fedora development tree already has helix for you info

"I, too, was hesitant to install the new RP10 package, especially after seeing the absolute crap that is RealOne for Windows."

You should have tried the RealOne for Linux beta version. Totally fried my GNOME so i had to restart X or only use the RealOne player which was buggy anyway.

I'm gonna try out RealPlayer 10 but only to play what cannot be played with MPlayer. Which basically means: streams which are encoded using the Real codecs.

In the meantime there is demand for an open standard so that any OS is able to play the content. None of the proprietary codecs allow this so it will be an interesting time with Dirac and Theora on the sight.

PS: And i agree there is a market to play streaming content which demands WMV / DRM and various Quicktime / Sorenson codecs which do not exist natively. The media player which has this feature and is able to play the other codecs (including Real's proprietary codecs) as well has the most potential to become the standard media player application. "One application allowing one job to support all the existing codecs, especially the popular ones." That is what users want.

I tried installing realplayer 10 on slack 10 in KDE. It seemed to install ok but crashes when I start it up. RealPlayer 8 did work ok but not it crash too.

you have been warned.

I also have it installed on my Slack 10 system (running Gnome) and it works fine.

You used the bash script right?

If I was new to the Linux OS and I wanted to use a mainstream application such as Realplayer for listening to audio streams and such, how would I go about installing it on my machine.
Would it be wrong to say the installation procedure, not to mention the steps the author went to in preparing his machine are more than a little scary(?)

Is there no automatic installation (like on mac/windows) on Linux?

curious joe:
"If I was new to the Linux OS ... how would I go about installing it on my machine?"

Depends which Linux distro you are using. There is a rpm version available from the real.com/linux site. And, there are probably distro specific packages to be found by the usual searching online.

The review shows RealPlayer 10's 'plain' installer with Slackware. And the reviewer was being careful to not mess up his current system - installing Real software has been known to clobber Windows and Mac systems for years.

I personally think the RealPlayer 10 is easy to install. The only trick with some distros is getting the web browser plugins installed. Depends on what flavor of linux you use.

Good Luck

i'm also amazed how efficient a player this is - it plays back mlb.tv streams (384kbit/sec audio and video in I think real 9 format) perfectly happily on my p2-400 / 128mb RAM laptop. realone for windows doesn't stand a chance on a p3-667 with 192mb RAM...

It works great for me, the integration is great, however, thi spopup at Real's music site says it all....

Sorry,

Downloads are only available on PCs running Windows 98 and up and with:

* Internet Explorer 5.5, or newer
* Netscape 7.0, or newer

Kevin

"I, too, was hesitant to install the new RP10 package, especially after seeing the absolute crap that is RealOne for Windows."

I've stayed away from Real for a long time because of this... I even told my mother if she ever installed RealPlayer on her windows pc, I wouldn't fix it anymore. I read this article, and then came back and read all the comments. From the comments, I take it that the Linux version works much better. Thanks guys, I'll go install it tonight and give it a test drive. And maybe become a BBC radio addict like the rest of you.

"Would it be wrong to say the installation procedure, not to mention the steps the author went to in preparing his machine are more than a little scary(?)"

They are not that scary. However there is an RPM version, so (on Fedora, from Nautilus) the installation is a simple double-click, "root password", "yes". Easy enough?

Yeah, I saw that too. That's too bad as they appear to have a pretty good selection of music there.

can't you make your browser act as if it were Netscape 7?

I just tried the website and at least the preview clips work for me

It's too bad you can't try out their Rhapsody service like you can try Launch.com though. I'm pretty sure I'd forget to cancel within 14 days if it turned out they didn't have music I like.

Junk. Such app have no future on Linux platform and should be baned as they are enforced by corupted conmpanies.

I also installed it and was disappainted at the lack of included codecs. Come on Real, give us legal codecs. Plenty of people would be willing to pay as shown in the comments here.

is the reason for the only hard-lock i have ever had on a linux box. the program ate all 512MB of RAM and 512MB of swap on my machine while playing a video. that was 4 or 5 months ago, so I guess that was version 8 or 9.

I changed my browser to report IE 5.5 and W98, and it got past the first check, however, it then tells me that I can't play this type of file, I need to upgrade my version of Realplayer. Likely a windows only codec, or some other windows only hook. That was a good idea, and got close, but no cigar.

Kevin