02-16-2007, 04:11 AM
> I never understand why people bash Real.
For starters, it's simply not installed on a lot of computers anymore... and fewer sites use it with every passing year... for good reason. So it's annoying to encounter it if you are in the majority and don't have the player.
On the PC side, it's practically a virus. The player is spyware and it opens the door for all sorts of exploits.
On the Mac side, everything that you view with the Real Player and details of your system are reported to Real unless you go into the preferences and disable all that... and there's a hidden set of pref's that have to be changed in addition to the obvious ones.
The player has been crash-prone in every release but the last two... it took them a decade to get around to fixing it.
Real uses a tightly controlled bunch of codecs that can make it a PITA to use and to save or transcode the video. Yeah, Apple's Fairplay is not much different, but it's different enough and the morality behind Apple's DRM doesn't seem quite so sleazy.
Real's executives are very obnoxious about their DRM and they go around insulting Apple all the time for not opening up Fairplay even while they go about locking down their own encoder. They've turned online multimedia into an "us or them" fight. They treat their users like chattel and they're losing the fight. somehow that's Apple's "fault."
So there are several reasons not to prefer Real on the Mac. Briefly: There's a shrinking population of sites using it for streaming multimedia; The player application reports home; The people running the company are jerks.
For starters, it's simply not installed on a lot of computers anymore... and fewer sites use it with every passing year... for good reason. So it's annoying to encounter it if you are in the majority and don't have the player.
On the PC side, it's practically a virus. The player is spyware and it opens the door for all sorts of exploits.
On the Mac side, everything that you view with the Real Player and details of your system are reported to Real unless you go into the preferences and disable all that... and there's a hidden set of pref's that have to be changed in addition to the obvious ones.
The player has been crash-prone in every release but the last two... it took them a decade to get around to fixing it.
Real uses a tightly controlled bunch of codecs that can make it a PITA to use and to save or transcode the video. Yeah, Apple's Fairplay is not much different, but it's different enough and the morality behind Apple's DRM doesn't seem quite so sleazy.
Real's executives are very obnoxious about their DRM and they go around insulting Apple all the time for not opening up Fairplay even while they go about locking down their own encoder. They've turned online multimedia into an "us or them" fight. They treat their users like chattel and they're losing the fight. somehow that's Apple's "fault."
So there are several reasons not to prefer Real on the Mac. Briefly: There's a shrinking population of sites using it for streaming multimedia; The player application reports home; The people running the company are jerks.