No need for Real...

lonny

lonny

Fearless Thinker
just a thought...
Real is apparently moving to mpeg4 for video streaming.
Since Quicktime is able to play mpeg4, that means that we don't need to install Real bloatware (which is not even out yet).

I remeber reading a LONG time ago that Real and Apple were working on a new, common standard.

It's good to have open standards! :cool:
 
Well, we never really actually _wanted_ Real on OS X. It's just that there are so and so many files in .rm format on the net that can't be viewed without the Classic version of the Real player. So a Real OS X player would be handy sometimes. And the move to MPEG-4 by Real will take some time. And this won't change anything about all the files that are still out there in .rm format. But yes, the problem will solve itself over, say, the next five to ten years (which is a very, very long time, isn't it?).
 
Nobody I know WANTS Real for OS X, they just want to be able to view Real content that we are now locked out of.

Even with Real's adoption of MP4, it will still take several years for most of their userbase to adopt it. I bet the Mac community will adopt MP4 and QT6 fully (meaning over 85%) within 12-18 months. The Wintel community is a much larger ship, and will take more time to turn.

Real said they would have their player out by the end of the year, but who knows if that will hold up. I'm curious as to what route they are going with their OS X client - are they carbonizing the OS 9 client or
 
Just because Real will be using MPG4 doesn't mean that QuickTime will automatically be able to view Real stuff. It'll still be in the Real format, and will be unreadable by anything but the RealPlayer or whatever software they're pushing now.
 
Someone sent a letter to real and they said they couldn't talk about Real Player/ONE for OS X until July 17 which is MWNY also I want RealOne because I am subscribed to be bale to download MP3's and other stuff legally from RealOne

So I want RealOne or at least Real Player :)
 
what ablack said about the whole Real/July 17 thing sounded promising. Personally, I don't have problems with Real. I don't particularly like the format but I wouldn't mind having Real Player (or RealOne, whatever) on my machine.
 
I'm no fan of Real player, but I got RealOne for Win2k at work for something. It took the association for audio CDs, and the player is actually really nice. Besides downloading the track list, it also gets the album cover and info. Pretty cool. Of course the playlists and such are totally non-intuitive.
 
I'd only use real player for listening to samples of music off Amazon.com, but if they gave Apple the code for real player and Apple implemented it into Quicktime, that would be awesome! (same for Windows Media Player).
 
Well, MPEG-4 is a standard for the video and audio, which includes what codecs can and cannot be used. For Real to use their own proprietary codec with MPEG-4 would be a hack, possibly breaking their license agreement, and wouldn't be MPEG-4 anymore (just like DivX isn't MPEG-4). Real would like to push the RM format, BUT I think they realized they should focus on content and player, not formats.

So in the end, if it is MPEG-4 and is actually MPEG-4 (like a cigar is a cigar, not as in a cigar is a cigarette), then any player compatible with the MPEG-4 standard will be able to view it.

Personally, I wouldn't want to see Apple try to get the rights to implement the RM format or the WM formats for QT. Real would just say no, and MS *MIGHT* say yes with a few thousand strings attached (which may include helping them get out of their current legal problems by showing MS is playing nice with another company)
 
If everyone uses MPEG-4 (WMP, Real, QT), and if they're interoperable to full extent, like, say, MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) files, then we'll finally see who wins. But will QuickTime have a chance then? On the Mac platform, there'll be no question, as QuickTime is a basic layer of the operating system already. But on Windows? Apple is one step ahead on the server side, I think, but we haven't seen yet the streaming servers of Real and MS for MPEG-4.

May you live in interesting times...
 
Same views with Hazmat. I liked RealOne's album cover display and info, although it just eye candy but I prefer that over any visualizer.

I've reviewed MusicMatch and WinAmp and based on my good enough bud headphones at work, RealOne has the better sounding player that the other two. Most Winamp add ons tend to distort the sound when improperly set, I have no time to waste tweaking such things in the first place.

Therefore, I wouldnt mind RealOne being ported or created for the Mac.

iTunes does not work over our proxy server (except for the CDDB db) but I think it and along with RealOne are the better sound producing players out there....but then again they also seem to take up a lot of resources when active.
 
Originally posted by Krevinek
So in the end, if it is MPEG-4 and is actually MPEG-4 (like a cigar is a cigar, not as in a cigar is a cigarette), then any player compatible with the MPEG-4 standard will be able to view it.
Click to expand...

I don't think this is entirely true... for example, QuickTime .mov files use some pretty common compression standards, but the movie files created are viewable only by the QuickTime player.

Just because something implements MPEG4 doesn't mean that ANY old MPEG4-compliant player will be able to view the content. It will just be MPEG4 content wrapped up ina proprietary format... I'd bet money that if RealNetworks (or whatever they're calling themselves now) implemented MPEG4 into their files, they would STILL be .RA or .RM files and viewable only by the RealPlayer application.
 
Still wouldn't be MPEG-4 anymore, since it breaks the specs for the file format. MPEG-4 isn't just the specs for the codecs, but the file format too. Break any part, and it cannot be labelled as MPEG-4 (at least in nit-picking terms... DivX and 3ivX manage to get away with calling it 'MPEG-4 based' and 'MPEG-4 compliant' even though they don't even get CLOSE to the final standard except in terms of filesize/quality).

In the end, it is a moot point because now we have 3 formats that can compete for supremacy in online piracy... erm... I mean online video: Windows Media Video (Losing Badly), DivX (Current Champ), and MPEG-4 (New Challenger with Promise). I think the real question is if DivX will fall to MPEG-4 and the 'open' standards it brings, or if the current wealth of tools for DivX will just prevent people from switching over.

Doesn't help those people trying to play WMV or RM formatted media files though...
 
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