BBC & Realplayer

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Defiant

I agree with that but I'd also put money on it that Microsoft would do the BBC a very nice deal to get there player on there. Perhaps even give it free. Never known Microsoft to pass up a coup anyway

But that does not mean the hardware will be free, nor the developer time to put multi standard on all the pages, or the staff time to encode in multi format (or developer time to automate this process).

No matter how cheap a software licence is, the other costs of implementation are generally large in a situation such as this.

[Defiant]

Originally Posted by SMHarman

But that does not mean the hardware will be free, nor the developer time to put multi standard on all the pages, or the staff time to encode in multi format (or developer time to automate this process).

No matter how cheap a software licence is, the other costs of implementation are generally large in a situation such as this.

At the end of the day anything is better than realplayer the quility is cr#p

[Stuart W]

No-one has mentioned this yet.......

RealPlayer is also a nasty little spy.

Take a look at how much traffic goes FROM your realplayer to the realplayer network whilst you are watching a clip.

....maybee this threadshould have been called "I hare REalPlayer because...."

Originally Posted by Defiant

At the end of the day anything is better than realplayer the quility is cr#p

The last time I had a chance to view the same piece of video, encoded at the same bitrate, playing simultaneously on WMP and RealOne, side by side on my PC screen at work, I found the Real video to be noticeably better, with sharper contrast and brighter colours. The WMP video was muddy by comparison.

I'm curious what you base your opinion on - have you experimented with it in this way?

[Defiant]

Originally Posted by towny

I'm curious what you base your opinion on - have you experimented with it in this way?

Some of the worst picture quility I've seen and I've used quicktime, Mediaplayer divx/xvid you name it

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by towny

The last time I had a chance to view the same piece of video, encoded at the same bitrate, playing simultaneously on WMP and RealOne, side by side on my PC screen at work, I found the Real video to be noticeably better, with sharper contrast and brighter colours. The WMP video was muddy by comparison.

I'm curious what you base your opinion on - have you experimented with it in this way?

I'll second that, I've watched movies I've encoded at the same bit rates in RM, Divx and Xvid, the RM quality was noticably better.

Originally Posted by Defiant

Some of the worst picture quility I've seen and I've used quicktime, Mediaplayer divx/xvid you name it

Have you put the same video, same bitrate, in the different formats, side by side on your screen and played them simultaneously?

I hate Realplayer because it never works properly and is such a pushy piece of software.I never feel in control of it.So I won't use it.

Incog.

[Defiant]

Originally Posted by towny

Have you put the same video, same bitrate, in the different formats, side by side on your screen and played them simultaneously?

Hmm only testing I done in the past when I had that rubbish on my computer was trying a DVD out with it. The picture was not as Mediaplayer

Originally Posted by Incognitas

I hate Realplayer because it never works properly and is such a pushy piece of software.I never feel in control of it.So I won't use it.

Incog.

I hate the way it is getting increasingly difficult to find just the free player on the Real site. I hate the way you have to spend ages going through all its settings before you're sure it will only do what you want, when you want. But I also recognise that Real Player is like this as a result of pressure from the marketeers and the bean counters at Real who are trying to make money out of it. I don't let it cloud my judgement of the core product, which is a streaming media player whose codecs produce good-quality video.

Originally Posted by Defiant

Hmm only testing I done in the past when I had that rubbish on my computer was trying a DVD out with it. The picture was not as Mediaplayer

That's interesting, as it may point to RealPlayer basically being crrap as a DVD player, or at least not as good at it as WMP. But I do maintain that when you test the players with their proprietary formats side by side, Real's is noticeably better than M$.

[Stephen]

I hate the program but find the picture qaulity on some sites as my 3D card has a feature that cleans up and applies a filter to streaming video making it look really nice. Also on a 1MB connection so that helps too.

[Lew]

This is one of the times that I'm glad that the Mac version of a program doesn't have the full feature set of the Windows version. The OS X version of RealOne Player is just a basic player for RealMedia and pretty much nothing else. No DVD playback, message centre or any of that other crap. Just drag & drop the program to install, and on the first run it installs the browser plugin to /Library/Internet Plugins

[philip.j.fry]

Originally Posted by towny

But I also recognise that Real Player is like this as a result of pressure from the marketeers and the bean counters at Real who are trying to make money out of it. I don't let it cloud my judgement of the core product, which is a streaming media player whose codecs produce good-quality video.

You're absolutely right about it being the marketers influence that's causing the problem. The developers do a version for Linux/Unix systems called the Community Edition, but because it's not a product that they sell, the marketers haven't had any influence over it, and I have to say it's actually quite a good player. It doesn't contain any of the regular rubbish that the other versions of realplayer do.

[Defiant]

I think I've found the answer to my own question here anyway. I just checked out www.bbcworld.com. They have Realplayer on there too of course but its subscription only. So there no doubt using Realplayer still on www.bbc.co.uk because of the subscription only bussiness on that website