OSNews

I checked the plugins in Mozilla 1.7 and there was a strange new beast: Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In ver 0.4.0.293 July 30, 2004 built with gcc 3.2.2. Best of all, it does the job very nicely. It opens and plays the BBC java screens when called and the external RealPlayer 10 started when needed. Things were working very snappy from Mozilla.

Well, I was finally ready for my test drive around the net. I visited dozens of websites to test both RealAudio and RealVideo capabilities. Overall, it was very successful. I gave the player lots of punishment jumping around and was amazed that it never choked and died. The best news for me was that all the BBC streams and archives worked perfect and sounded very good on the small stereo I have hooked to this machine. The NPR radio feeds also worked great. I did find sites like Amazon.com and NASA that were using older 'nonsupported' Real formats. The player always gave me descriptive error messages when it could not play a format. I am not too bothered about those broken formats, we constantly run into weird and broken media files all over the web.

Of course, I also went to the various RealNetworks audio, video, and musicstore sites where the player worked flawlessly. One pleasant surprise for me was RealVideo - very bright, crisp, and smooth playing. I watched movie trailers that were very impressive (discovered new Pixar 'The Incredibles' coming out in Nov). I have never bothered with RealVideo before since I have always kept Quicktime on all my linux (using Crossover), Mac, and Windows machines.

My final test was to see if my poor old out-dated vsound 0.5 application would work with RealPlayer10, new Alsa, and kernel 2.6.7. Short answer is that it works beautifully! Tested some of my scripts and everything worked solid. The new kernel appears to handle the 'OSS driver compatibility' problem I had feared. I encoded a variety of ogg files from various RealAudio sources and they were every bit as good as my previous best. I listen to classical music and radio plays on my iRiver H120 portable ogg player and these new files are very clean - for streaming audio. I really can't say I can 'hear' much difference between RP8 and RP10, after all it's basically just extreme compression to trick the ear anyway. While the wav files I capture from BBC RealAudio sound pretty decent, a quiet background without hum or hiss is what I really strive for. RealPlayer10's solid performance on my Slack 10 linux has definitely impressed me.

So, will I be updating my other machines with RealPlayer 10? Absolutely! I'm sure there are hidden problems I did not find, but what I did see was pretty impressive. I think RealNetworks has made a good effort to provide the linux community with a robust and useful media tool that I for one am glad to have. Boy, that was tough for me to say considering the nasty things I've said about RealNetworks in the past! Oh yes, I have absolutely no connection to RealNetworks!

About the Author:
Gary Routh is now retired after 35 years of data communication and computer work. He lived in England for 6 years and still drinks his cuppa tea every morning. Retirement + high-speed broadband means discovering new things each and every day.