Friedbeef’s Tech

What’s the problem with Real Media Player?

Started in 1995, Real Media used to be my media player of choice back in the old days, when I was still using my 56k modem.  The compression was awesome, and it was one of the only ways I could get decent streams of multimedia via a dial-up connection.

Years later, its star has since fallen.  As other players emerged, and Internet bandwidth became more abundant, Real lost it’s competitive edge as it struggled to keep up and its media player became bloated with too many unwanted ‘features’

Till this day, the one single thing which most people hate most about Real Player is the fact that it tends to install a lot of other programs onto your system aside from the core media player.  To make things worse, many people have also complained that once they put it in - they found it incredibly hard to take it out.

Why bother about Real Media at all?

As much as I’d like to ignore the Real Media format altogether, there are some big sites which still use it (WHY?) for streaming content.  Sites like the BBC currently only offer streaming of certain shows in nothing but that format.  hate it as you may, you cannot escape completely from it.

What options do you have?

The thing is - Real Media is a propriety format which most players can’t read.  Even the ultra-flexible VLC player will not play RealAudio (.ra .rpm), or RealMedia (.rm .ram .rmvb .rpx .smi .smil) formats. 

Enter ‘Real Alternative’, a free lightweight player that can in fact play these files without messing up your whole system!

Some advantages compared to RealPlayer:

• Quick and easy install
• It’s easy to make an unattended installation
• Proper uninstallation
• No background processes
• Use a player of your own choice
• Low on resources
• No advertising, no registration forms, nothing annoying

Try this, and you’ll never have to face the dreaded ‘real’ Real Media Player ever again!

(Real Alternative)

What are your thoughts on Real Media?  Tell us in the comments!

[tags] media player, video, audio [/tags]

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In our last installment of ‘On-The-Go’ we had a look at two great media mobile applications.  This time around, we’ll be taking a look at some of my favourite business orientated mobile web apps.

Translate hardcopy documents into searchable text with scanR

scanR is a service that helps you capture information contained in whiteboards, documents and business cards. scanR lets you use your mobile camera phone or digital camera to clean photos of whiteboards, documents and business cards, extract the printed information, and get a digital file in your email, contact manager, or fax.

Just snap a pic, then MMS or send it to scanR in an email, and you get a searchable (NOT just a mere image) PDF sent back to you.  The only catch is that you need to have a 2 megapixel or better camera on your phone for best results.

Catch up with the latest business news with Plusmo

RSS feeds are the bread and butter of my reading on the web - so having them on my mobile is the only sensible way I’d ever use my phone to catch up with the latest news.

Now I’ve tried plenty of mobile RSS readers, but I liked about Plusmo was that offered offline reading as well.  This is great if you just want to download all your reading at one go and look at it later - Perfect for the road warrior who’s always on the go.

Special thanks to David Lian who hooked me up with a Wi-Fi enabled Nokia N93i so I could play around with these cool mobile web apps.

Want more cool mobile apps?  Check out part 1 of this series.

What other mobile web applications do you like?  Let us know in the comments!

[tags] plusmo, mobile, cellphone, scanr [/tags]

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