[Gllug] KVM-over-internet

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2012, Phil Reynolds wrote:

> Tethys <sta296 at astradyne.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> >I tend to agree. I always found the Linux realplay to Just
> >Work?????????  with a clean UI and it was mostly a joy to use.
> 
> A real joy. A great shame it was never available for amd64. I've
> managed with mplayer since. I do prefer software that is truly free
> but have no objection to non-free that "just works".

By the time people were using amd64 in great numbers, Real had already
all but given up.  They'd released the helix client as open source for
the community and the community were mostly uninterested.

Meanwhile xine and gmplayer had loads of configurable skins!!! Oooh how
useful! 

There was a time when ogg lovers were sending complaint emails to the
BBC about their use of Real, whilst real still supported more platforms
(Amiga, RiscOS, all the various UNIX flavours...) than people had
bothered compiling the GNU src code for ogg123 to!  Of course these
complaints from the tin-foil hat brigade was not going to make the BBC
switch to an open format* that wouldn't play out of the box on Windows.
The BBC management as most companies were doing, was evaluating whether
it was MS Windows Media format, or Real that efforts should have
continued invested in.  So these complaints were only about to lead to
an even less free less playable replacement :(

We should count ourselves lucky that Flash won in the end.  Even though
it was technically inferior in so many ways.

 - Damion

*Note that we actually did do an Ogg streaming trial.  Not only was it
not that popular, but to actually make icecast even remotely as reliable
and proficient at streaming the audio to large numbers of the public as
RealNetworks serving infrastructure, required loads of our own patches!
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug