Update on Helix Player

Hi everyone,

A couple months ago, I sent out mail helping a couple folks out with
getting RealPlayer 8 for Linux.  Now, I want to tell people "don't use
that, we have something new and shiny!"

Here's an update on the Helix Player initiative from RealNetworks. 
We're working on an open source, multi-format player (w/a couple of
proprietary components, notably for RealAudio and RealVideo playback).

We posted our first milestone release last month, and we've started
posting nightly builds.  Details for downloading this are here:
https://player.helixcommunity.org/

The good:
*  Video playback is vastly improved over RealPlayer 8 and the RealOne
Player Alpha that's currently available on 
*  Includes Ogg Vorbis support
*  Includes SMIL 2.0, along with JPEG, GIF, PNG, and RealPix.  This
allows for some really impressive presentation capabilities
(transitions, alphablending, etc).  To show off what can be done using
only the open source components of this player (e.g. no RealAudio and
RealVideo), I put together the following presentation, which can be
played with the Helix Player:

Playback:
 http://rtsp.org/2003/demos/oggsmil/oggdemo.smil
Download:
 http://rtsp.org/2003/demos/oggsmil.tar.gz

What this doesn't show off is the ability to do transitions between
video presentations or alphablend a translucent logo on top of a video,
but you can at least start to see why it's cool.

The bad:
*  The installation of this player isn't perfectly streamlined, but not
rocket science.  
*  Not all formats are supported yet.  RealText and RealFlash are
notable omissions that are on the plan.  Windows Media is not on the
plan.
*  Some hangups with SMIL...for example, we've got some bugs with path
handling that keep us from showing off the battery of content we've
developed to really show off SMIL
*  It's still pre-release quality.  There's lots of quirks, but those
are fewer by the day.

All said, we're pretty proud of how it's shaping up.  However,
development, testing, and documentation are all in short supply, so we
can really use your help.  We really want to work with the community to
make Linux a great multimedia desktop system.

Rob
-- 
Rob Lanphier, Helix Community Coordinator - RealNetworks
http://helixcommunity.org http://rtsp.org http://realnetworks.com