Thread: realplayer = virus

You hate the company protecting it's investment. Okay, but that is a normal business practice. We do not live in an open source world, not yet anyway, and as long as the patents issue is finally laid to rest, we may get better.

That is not the same as your original post though. You said RealPlayer did a whole load of anti-social things. I am saying I do not find that to be the case at all.

Give me some specific examples of what it is doing that is so wrong. (Specific examples do not include rhetoric and angst).

I was quite annoyed the first time I installed with default settings. It changed the file associations of just about everything to play with Real, glued a tray icon to my screen that was troublesome to get rid of, and several other minor baddies that I don't recall. Most could have been prevented if I'd been more careful while installing; but in the end, tracking down and fixing all the problems became so time-consuming that I ended up uninstalling it and avoiding it for about a year and a half. A similar story goes for Quicktime (tray icon with no built-in option to remove it, or maybe that was Real and other problems were Quicktime).

I have since installed both on my system, and I now have no further problems.

i guess the cost of the encoder/decoder is just a downfall of the software and the company. I understand this complaint had nothing to do with the original concern of the software having spyware/virus properties. so i do appologize for adding that in, and getting side tracked in the thread. but i do feel that the practices of the player do resemble in a watered down way a hijacking software. but on the issue of the media choice i do feel that if the person that encoded the data allows me to reproduce, distribute, etc, i should not have to access the data with a third party software to encode/decode. i do realize this issue is ultimately between me and the webmasters that prvided me with the recordings. i feel the ethical way should be to allow me to encode and decode with a codec made by real, but in my own prepurchased or opensource encoder/decoder. does anyone know if there is an opensource codec for real media that i can embed into an encoder of my choice or making?

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does anyone know much about the new helix project they have?
i have been unable to find the documentation on the helix encoder.
I do not like the idea of the license it uses, but i would use it if need be.
Does the helix encoder provide the capability to encode and decode real audio into wave?
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