[gst-devel] Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting

[Rob Adams]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 13:17, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Looking at the actual situation, the real codecs are one
> of the last to not have been reverse-engineered in some project.

I should point out that window media and sorenson quicktime video
haven't been reverse engineered by anyone -- rather wrappers have been
written around the windows versions of the codecs to allow them to be
played in mplayer or xine.  This works very well and so there's really
no reason to bother reverse engineering the codec.

I think that no effort has been applied to perform a similar effort on
the real codecs because nobody uses realvideo anywhere unless they also
have some other format.  This is mainly because the RealOne player can
best be described as a trojan horse, slipping its foul tentacles into
every aspect of the windows desktop, making it a decidedly unpleasant
thing to deal with.  Combine that with the fact that RealVideo is
substandard and you don't really have a lot of enthusiasm left for it.

Now, if Real wants to try to resurrect itself with a new spirit of
openness I applaud their efforts, but they've got a lot of ground to
make up.

-Rob