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]
[...] Do you remember when you last used the Real Media Player? Many websites still want the Real Media Player installed if you want to access their multimedia content. It’s a bulky program just to access content on some websites and it doesn’t make sense to download it and then install it even if it is free. There is an alternative available. [...]