Har har. "Real problems? *groan*. Aaaanyway, several good post including:

• Some mac player love
• Some HelixPlayer love
• Some RealPlayer 10 love

Click and clack are back!

My favorite comments include:

• This one, which is a great summary of some of the cool things we've been doing.
• Someone is interested in seeing Rhapsody on unix
• Independant confirmation that the new player is well-behaved here, here, here, here, here, among other places.
• This comment made me laugh :)

In HelixPlayer news:

• Someone likes HelixPlayer
• Someone tried out the HelixPlayer on RH7.2, and had problems with an old version of gtk. For the record, HelixPlayer requires gtk2.2 and above. We've had that in the release notes since MS1, but perhaps we need to have that more prominently displayed somewhere. I'm using debian/unstable for development, myself. Other developers are using SuSE, RH9, etc. RH7.2 is getting a little old.
• Another good word for the HelixPlayer

In other news, I now have a "freak" (in slashdot-terminology wise)... spinlocked :(

So this show on NPR Car Talk switched from Real to Windows media. The full story slashdot story is here

It's mostly hate, though one person did point out one of Karl's threads on doom9.org, which I found interesting.

So I'm going through the slashdot threads for the "Real Announces Helix Grant Winners" story, and thought it might be a great idea to make some notes in my journal here:

The highlight posts for me are:

• On mplayer having its own demons (never mind licensing)
• Kevin pointing out that we have awesome services
• The helpful replies to Elaine's post

In particular, codemachine makes great, constructive points here To summarize:

• Xiph is good
• HelixPlayer has a lot of competition [ed: Check out the mozilla plugin -- we're the only ones doing all the bells and whistles]
• HelixPlayer needs to get into the distributions.

An AC also mentioned that having to register to download is lame, and that he'd like to see a "proprietary codecs" install option.

Some stuff goes without saying -- there is the usual raging against RealOne for Windows, and some kind souls who point out that this story isn't about RealOne.

There are the usual comments that "the RealVideo codec sucks". I am convinced this based on comparing rips of South Park or something because RealVideo:

• Is a great codec
• Works as well on linux as it does on windows, mac, symbian, etc. and various processor families. This includes all the little things like multichannel audio, url hurling, etc (not in the HelixPlayer yet, mind you, but that's in the works).

People who say the codec sucks should check out the info on hc.org, and the RV10 showcase

joe_bruin questioned device strategy. Device support was a big part of RealPlayer 10, and helix has https://devicedrm.helixcommunity.org. I also pointed out our news page, which says a lot about what our partners are doing with Helix.

kforeman had this post, which was good to see. I hope the +5 Informative was a reflection of people thinking "Gee, I'd like to see this kind of thing on Linux".

People are happy about the xiph ogg/vorbis/theora support, as am I. If you want cross-platform open technology, you can do xiph. If you need state-of-the-art (with all the patents, licensing, binary only stuff that comes with that) you can do Real{Video,Audio}.

There is confusion about all the players -- particularly what DR5 vs MS2 vs All_clients vs HelixPlayer (HelixPlayer is what you want, All_clients DR5 is not). I'd like to see this fixed on the nightly builds page.

Thanks to all those who posted constructive comments. We read 'em all

Ryan Gammon