QotD: Real-ly?
Posted August 17th, 2004 @ 09:58am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: What do you think of Real?
My Answer: I don't particularly care for Real. I've always found them to be annoying, and I don't know anyone that uses the store… so I don't really care whether I can play songs on my iPod or not. iTunes is the best player and the best store, but most of my songs remain MP3s or M4As that I've ripped myself from CD.
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Posted 17 Aug 2004 at 12:29pm #
I hate Real and I don't care how cheap thier music is, I'll never buy from them.
Posted 17 Aug 2004 at 1:22pm #
Well, any company that volunteers for some proper ass kicking by respected columnists and bloggers deserves a teeny, tiny bit of recognition.
Posted 17 Aug 2004 at 2:36pm #
My first geek job about 6 years ago was watching lawyer training videos, cause you at least used to be able to use SMIL with Real player to make up presentations. You could have your video file, a table of contents and then what my job was primarily focused on, simple little text in an area show up at specified times. I would watch a 2 hour video over and over again in the course of two weeks picking out a key phrase about every 30 seconds and the specific time to have it come on. It drove me nuts, but let me get into making web applications and sites professionally. I personally hate Real, its way of doing things was always so annoying, once your video file was encoded real that was pretty much it, you couldn't do a thing with it after that except play it. I have stayed away from it ever since.
Posted 17 Aug 2004 at 5:11pm #
Two words: Real Obnoxious
Posted 17 Aug 2004 at 11:21pm #
I cringe at any Real content about as much as when I come across Windows Media content. I dislike the RealPlayer app as well. I guess if enough people have the same experiences that I've had with Real, they'd have to take desperate tactics to have business.
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 12:07am #
I think that Real had some good ideas and concepts about video and hooking it up with the web. They're software also had a lot of good ideas and intentions.
That said, their implementations of those ideas were always so terrible. They just didn't seem to be able to put together something that didn't fall apart.
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 3:39am #
I can't buy music online and I don't own a portable player, so that discussion is a moot point. I must admit, on the other hand that I really disliked their v8 player, which would install links and crap all over the system. The latest version (v10?) seems to be better...
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 8:02am #
The worst part of Real is that when you download their player you needed to gived a credit card number so they can sign you up for RealPass (or something like that). The bad part was that there is way to cancel that service online, you needed to call them to do that. Stupid!
As far on content, I usually get pretty good streaming video from Real, as opposed to Windows Media. But their business practices are horrid.
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 9:57am #
Gabe: Note that there's a free player that doesn't require any subscription, you just downloaded the wrong thing.
download page
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 11:01am #
Seems like an MS-style company to me - where the business model does not by default include like "making nice software" - but certainly it does not contain the expression "to create new standards and bring innovation".
Now Real is pretty arrogant, right? Like brute-forcing into the iPod and talking about how bad Realmedias Competitors are.
The thing with the subscription et al. while downloading is one of those tricks they seem to use: They think the customer is the most stupid thing on earth and they try to catch'em. Watch out, i always said *gg*
I have to note that some real content is pretty nice qualitiy given the bandwidth it is recorded, but it also uses up all my CPU for this, or, say, it uses exceptionally much CPU power to do its thing. That the skin is almost as ugly as MS's Evilplayer 9 is one other thing then again 😛
Note: I dont say Apple is the paradise, but this company certainly has helped the industry and is responsible for a number of USEFULL things.
Posted 18 Aug 2004 at 6:47pm #
Real is a pretty disgusting company. Just look at the way they try to trick people into buying their crap.
I don't care how cheap their music is now, I wouldn't ever buy anything from a company with such horrible business practices.
Posted 20 Aug 2004 at 9:16pm #
Some thoughts on Real and Apple
The recent controversy between Real and Apple over Harmony has really grabbed my interest. For those who haven't been following the controversy what follows is a quick summary. Around mid-April Real contacted Apple in regards to opening up a m...