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!
What are your thoughts on Real Media? Tell us in the comments!
[tags] media player, video, audio [/tags]
Thanks for sharing, am gonna blog about this too. This is indeed a good player for playing Real format. I also don’t quite like the Real Player as it just show many things that is not necessary.
Real Player didn’t come out until 1997, and there was no 56k modem in 1995 either.
More like 14.4k or 28.8k.
Real Alternative is pretty cool though, it’s based on an old version of Windows Media Player. Good lightweight alternative for playing RM.
I use Media Player Classic for rmvb files. The original Real Player always show updates and ads of their own!
I had to rebuild my hard drive this week. I went to Google Pack and they offered Real Player so I grabbed it. I like it. It’s not taking over anything, loads fast and runs light. I have it as my default mp3 player. I use iTunes for listening to my songs, but if I play a voicemail or something iTunes puts it in the library. I hate that. WMP takes too long to load up. RP fires up fast and I have it sized small. When the voicemail or whatever is done, closing it is fast. Nothing running in the background. Just does what I want it to do!
Shaolin: Thanks for the Comment. Real player did actually get released in 1995 http://www.realnetworks.com/company/index.html
My bit about 56k modems referenced to 1995… just that I was using 56k modems around the same time I started using Real Player.
rob: You’re the first person which has said anything nice about Real in a long time… maybe i’ll give it another shake one day.
the original real player is a real cumbersome to use. this alternative is most welcomed.
This is a really good alternative.
it says on the Real Alternative site that you cannot use Real Alternative for streaming media and that you must use the classic Real Media Player for streaming media.
@Rhonda – Thanks for your feedback. Don’t confuse media player classic with classic real media player. Media player classic is part of the bundle Real alternative comes with. It does not mean you have to install the original Real Media Player
Another vote for MP Classic. Real Player, several versions ago, is what drove me to do only monitored installs/uninstalls (InCtrl5/ChkCtrl), a practice I continue to this day. I had to clean the Registry by hand after the final uninstall, and to this day I find it hard to trust the Windows uninstall facility.
Alt. seems good since real player installs number of background process (msg centre, updates etc) without prior permission.
can VLC player be used with Real Alternative? I mean, MPC is the bundled one but can choose not to install it. So can VLC be used instead of MPC?
hey thanks a lot for the info, real player sucks
thumbs up!
I see that this was published back in 2007. Nowadays, you can play real media format with VLC! Hooray!
Ogg Vorbis has the same audio quality compared with the same size of real-media files. So I Ogg Vorbis becomes the alternative for the proprietary-based & hard to implement format :)
Pity ogg vorbis is not widely supported