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

[Michael Maloney]

We keep hearing from on high within the company that this message is  
being heard and that behavior will change. I guess it remains to be  
seen with the next and subsequent releases. Remember too that the  
community has within it's power to build a less obtrusive and open  
client...

On Thursday, December 11, 2003, at 10:30 AM, Bob wrote:

> I would have to agree on how annoying the real player is.  In our
> experimentation with Helix so far the complaints have been very loud
> that we should stick with windows media as the player was much less
> intrusive. However we feel windows is no longer a choice for us for a
> server platform so at the expected expense of losing viewers we are
> going to implement Helix despite the end users extreme dislike for the
> player.  A great improvement on the Real players would be to leave the
> end user not feeling like they have just installed nag/spy ware of the
> worst kind.
>
> On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 19:57, Rob Adams wrote:
>> Well I'm glad to hear that Real has improved the quality of its video
>> offerings recently.  It would perhaps have been more correct to say  
>> that
>> RealVideo has been historically substandard, as least as far as the
>> quality of video actually appearing in the RealVideo format, but it is
>> entirely possible that this will change in the future.
>>
>> The other end of it, of course, is the pain associated with installing
>> the RealVideo codec in the first place.  On the Windows platform, of
>> course, Real is at an inherent disadvantage because of Windows Media
>> Player not shipping with a RealVideo codec.  Real should take steps to
>> make viewing their video less difficult for users.  For the vast
>> majority of users, installing RealOne is the only way they know how to
>> get access to viewing the video (if there's a DirectShow plugin, you
>> certainly can't get to it from the web site), and RealOne player by
>> default is extremely annoying.  Most users will never launch RealOne
>> player at all, instead relying on it to automatically launch,  But for
>> some reason, Real deemed it necessary to install incons for in it:  
>> quick
>> launch toolbar, start menu, programs menu, desktop, _and_ the system
>> tray.  In addition, it helpfully displays popup advertisements in the
>> corner of the screen at random intervals.  Why would any user subject
>> themselves to that?  And in turn, why would any web site offer video
>> content in the Real format if they must ask that users subject
>> themselves to RealOne in order to view it?  Even if its theoretically
>> possible to configure RealOne so that it's not so annoying, most users
>> will be unable to do so.
>>
>> I realize of course that you're a codec engineer and so it's not your
>> fault, and of course rants about RealOne are hardly relevent on
>> desktop-devel, but it's something that frustrated me greatly when I
>> first installed RealOne some time ago.  It was like driving to the ice
>> cream shop only to discover that they were closed.
>>
>> On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 16:36, Karl Lillevold wrote:
>>> Dear Rob,
>>>
>>> I have to disagree in that there is little enthusiasm left for
>>> RealVideo. If you would be so kind as to take a look in this forum:
>>> http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=54 you will find a
>>> lot of RealVideo enthusiasm, in fact I will dare to claim that RV9 is
>>> currently the most popular New Codec, by far, among codec  
>>> enthusiasts.
>>>
>>> You will probably not believe our quality claims, so take a look in
>>> this thread, one of the many independent codec comparisons that have
>>> been posted in this forum:
>>> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64789
>>> As you will see the current RV9-EHQ has the best quality among all  
>>> the
>>> codecs tested in terms of the objective measures. The codecs included
>>> are RV9, WMV9, VP6, and two very popular MPEG-4 variants, XviD and
>>> DivX.  Subjectively, of course, opinions differ greatly and each
>>> codec has its own strength.  My point is that RV9 is highly
>>> competitive, and is being improved every month, as you can see from
>>> the news section in my 'sticky' RealVideo Information thread. Now
>>> there is admittedly a lot of bad looking video on the Internet in
>>> general. Much of this is older content, created with old codecs, and
>>> using sub-standard encoding procedures and source material.
>>>
>>> In this forum you will also find that one of the main reasons for  
>>> this
>>> popularity is that there are now many ways to play back RealVideo,
>>> including a DirectShow wrapper on Windows, as well as advice on how  
>>> to
>>> make RealOne behave nicely. On Linux there is the Helix Player  
>>> effort.
>>> As a video codec engineer, as well as enthusiastic about video
>>> playback on PCs, I need player choices. In fact, I use an alternative
>>> player myself on a daily basis, since it communicates more directly
>>> with the codec, and it is easier to isolate problems.
>>>
>>> And before you send off a quick reply about the forums referenced
>>> above, let me add that if it had not been for the useful feedback
>>> there, many of the recent RealVideo improvements would not have
>>> happened. I have attached a sample list below. There are participants
>>> from all 4-5 leading codec research teams (RV9, WMV9 two MPEG-4
>>> flavors, VP6), and independent tests of the same codecs, all of which
>>> show that since RV9-EHQ became publicly available for testing, is
>>> coming out on top in terms of compression efficiency.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> # Sub-titles, RealText
>>> # Native YV12 support in Helix Producer
>>> # Motivation to work on RV9-EHQ and all the great feedback on its  
>>> quality improvement.
>>> # Duplicated frame dropping pre-filter (RV9 Animation DropDupe  
>>> filter).
>>> # Improved 2-pass VBR in RV9.
>>> # Faster 1st pass when encoding RV9-EHQ.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>  Karl Lillevold       mailto:karll at real.com
>>>  Sr. Codec Engineer | RealNetworks Codec Group
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Wednesday, December 10, 2003, 1:38:29 PM, Rob Adams wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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  - mi|<e
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
---
Michael Maloney,  QA Project Engineer - RealNetworks
aim: r4bid1                  RaBBiT on irc.helixcommunity.org