Realplayer and the company

[Guybrush]

Can anyone give me some insight into the realplayer? How does it stack up against WMP and QT for streaming? Anyone try their goldpass? Thanks.

 

[IamDavid]

Real player is the the most overbloated peice of software know to man... If ya want a good mediaplayer go with MusicMatch.

 

[Moonbender]

RealPlayer is a wonderful example of how an application should not be. It's the very definition of bloatware. It puts his virtual fingers all over the system. Bah.
Also, try downloading the (free) Lite version - Real Inc doesn't make that very easy. The links for the even more bloated 'advanced' version of RealPlayer are everywhere, while the links to Lite version are always small and hard to find.

Anyway - I use it for real audio, and real video because I don't think any other player supports them, and nothing more. Never ever.

 

[FOBSIDE]

with the spread of faster internet connections to the common people, i see REAL having to make a lot of changes. for low bandwidth, they have pretty good streaming but i wouldnt use them for streaming for higher bandwidth clients.

 

[forkd]

Stay away from Real Player. They seem to be trying to control every computer. If a website cannot allow you to use a player other than Real then they are making a marketing error. I will not allow this program to infect any of my computers

 

[zhuqing]

I had trouble with Realplayer on my workstation (Windows NT 4.0 SP5 and SP6). I often got dead blue screen while working on my VC++ projects when it was installed. After I uninstalled that piece of software, my machine crashes much less. Just my own experience though.

Take care!

 

[PliotronX]

Bloatware title wars of 2000: Realplayer vs. ICQ 2000b

 

[IamDavid]

Bloatware title wars of 2000: Realplayer vs. ICQ 2000b

Realplayer by a couple registry entries....

 

[bigbootydaddy]

it even struggles to open on my 93 933...yup bloat.

 

[Jal]

I pulled out RealPlayer long ago.. Bloatware

When I read about their Download manager reporting back to homebase what you download, I got rid all Real products..

 

[highme]

I read somewhere about a plug in for Winamp that let you play Real Audio files. Real made them pull it from their website. Anybody know of somewhere I could find that. I can't stand Real Player, for the reasons stated above for the most part, but I can't listen to hockey with out it.

 

[Namuna]

Hey, nobody mentioned the 'feature' with Real Player where you have to do a Reg hack to stop the 'Real Player Start Center' from loading into the System Tray.

Or what kind of a PAIN IN THE ASS it is to revert Real Videos back to AVI/Mpeg.

Sad to say though, I actually like Real Media Encoder. Too damned bad these bastards won't make their stuff more open architecture. GREEDY MONKEY LOVERS!

 

[Rob G.]

It's not just bloated, it's a damn liability.

I've had the relatively benign G2 version for ages, but I needed Real Player 8 for the new Lord Of The Rings trailer.

This piece of crap makes so many attempts to 'phone home' it isn't even funny. ZoneAlarm Pro picked up 4 or 5 separate incidents of RP trying to contact mothership. Each time the connection was refused, RP would crash in a heap. All of the registration, automatic update and other such nonsense defaults to ON, so make sure they're all off before you connect.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of friggin about with the damn thing I finally got the trailer running in fullscreen - looks pretty nice! However RP8 has a nasty habit of shutting the machine down when you want to quit the clip. Not just a crash, no BSOD, just MACHINE OFF. Instantly.

Dreadful.