I was waiting for you to mention WinAmp, but you never did. That is the best mp3 player I have ever used. In fact here we are in 2023 and I am still using it. I have tried quite a few mp3 players over the years and still I have not found anything that suits my needs better than WinAmp.
I remember back in the day that was how I'd get South Park episodes in the early seasons when I was too poor for cable and only had a 56k modem to work with.
Real did a lot shady stuff. However, one thing that they did right was that the video and audio quality was relatively good when used with dial-up internet. Obviously this isn't important anymore.
I blame you if you don't know Realplayer. You should! That was OG internet video.. If you weren't a kid who marveled at the fact that FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER you could watch video on your personal computer from anywhere in the world - I feel sorry for you.. I have such fond memories of that player and a lot of the standup clips, seinfeld and tv show clips, maybe will and grace, the simpsons even, and even early cnet reviews I'd watch on there as well. RU-vid wouldn't exist without products like realplayer before them, so we should all appreciate that this now grown ass adult thought RealPlayer was REALLY COOL back in the day because of what it meant for the future - and it's pretty much played out exactly as he'd thought - yeah..
So one thing to remember, it would take like a day to download ONE song on a 56k modem. And we’re talking like a 3MB mp3. If you got disconnected for any reason, you’d have to start the download all over again. But you could listen to it instantly if it was a real media file. Some stations would stream their radio shows, or even live broadcasts. Before XM and Sirius radio, the only way to listen to FM stations from across the country was to listen to their real media stream. I remember senior year in high school, class of 2000, streaming music from the schools computer. Back then, this was borderline witchcraft.
Totally off topic but thinking back to RealPlayer made this pop in my head for some reason. File archivers in the pre zip and rar days. You needed a dozen different programs to unpack programs. So many file extenstions arc, lzh, zoo and others until finally most settled on zip/rar. Never were sure what was legit.
Between Real Player & Kazza, Some people was really screwed lol... I used Winamp or Widows Player because of the cool visuals playing music.. Winamp had sweet plugins you could use for yahoo & MSN messanager too, like setting your status to what music you was listening too..
I think RealPlayer was alright during the dialup days. I don't recall using it after that though. By the time I graduated to Windows XP I had already abandoned it. WMP was good enough for music and VLC was already starting to dominate video. Curiously though, I have experience with RealPlayer on mobile handhelds. It used to be on the Application CD that came with your Palm PDA and it was pre-installed on later handhelds. Thankfully they couldn't put ads in such a thing back then. It was a perfectly serviceable MP3 Player, free, it did the job but wasn't really something you kept for long. It could only play MP3s and RealMedia audio files (lol) and there existed free media players that could play a plethora of formats. Lastly, I remember they made an Android app for 2.3 (Gingerbread) and I remember it being pretty good as well. It had a good enough UI, it was still too early for it to have ads and it just worked. It still played MP3s (And I imagine it played RealMedia audio) and it did that well. (I personally preferred the ancient Android WinAmp though)
The fact that RealPlayer now boasts being a video download app is fucking ludicrous. It was RealNetworks who sued a company called Streambox immediately after the DMCA was passed because Streambox made a program called StreamboxVCR where you could program it like a VCR to record streaming broadcasts. And when I say "like a VCR", I mean EXACTLY like a VCR. You told it what time to start recording, and how long to record for, and then left it running and when something started streaming, it would save it for you so you could watch it later. And ONLY you could watch it later - it encrypted it so that it only worked on the same PC that recorded it. You couldn't copy it and give it to anybody else or anything. They did everything possible to make the software as similar to a VCR so that if they got sued, they could argue the same things Sony argued when they created the VCR. And it worked! Kinda... RealNetworks claimed that because they set 1 bit on the completely undocumented data stream (which Streambox had to reverse-engineer) that said "you are not allowed to record this", that qualified as a "copyright protection mechanism" and Streambox was breaking the DMCA by ignoring that 1 bit that RealNetworks refused to tell anyone its purpose. The courts thought that was bullshit. Streambox won their case. Then they won the appeal......... but, they were a foreign company and it was very expensive to keep fighting appeal after appeal as RealNetworks kept dragging it on and refusing to accept their loss. And eventually, they ran out of money. They couldn't afford to fly to the US and answer the last appeal. So RealNetworks won by default. And ever since then, it is considered settled legal precedent that even if the only thing you do is set 1 single bit and never tell anybody you did so, that is an adequate 'copyright protection mechanism' and the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA remain in place.
I hate that player the moment I got a new computer with that thing preinstalled and tried to play a video… I immediately uninstalled it and installed k-lite codec pack for movies and winamp for music. QuickTime was another junk player and it still is!
no way. Quicktime is awesome. been rock solid for 33 years; no spyware, popups, malware.... totally clean reliable media player. captures webcam and edits video too. the total opposite of Realplayer. @avashurov
To be fair, idk how they still exist in 2023...BUT i can tell you as a kid growing up through the early 2000s, real was relevant to me all the way up until about 2011ish specific for realdownloader which was the easiest way (at the time) to download just the audio (or download video and convert to audio) of youtube videos for small music channels and stuff that only posted their music to youtube. After 2011/2012 and the "maturing" of the internet that happened in that time however, idk how they survived until now
people need to get over their nostalgia. even when it worked RealPlayer wasnt that great. and the video player portion of the software had frequent issues. The spyware portion always worked just fine. I never voluntarily installed it, but in the old days when Windows had numerous security holes the damn thing would get forced on me all the time, and it was a nightmare to remove.
Real Player is NOT obsolete in the modern age and frankly speaking you can still download it completely for free in TODAY, 2023 direct from their their Real Networks, homepage!! In fact one newer feature of the Real Player app, is the ability to "single click download" any video content from most any website such as RU-vid and more!! And while the old Real Player WOULD literally "take over your computer" changing all your settings to run Real Player to open EVERY file format, the platform did things that no other program in its heyday did, which like VLC does now, in that you had a "one stop program" that opened ALL file content!!!
VLC player does not contain ads and spyware and plays almost all, if not all, known media formats known to man. RealPlayer was and is limited in that respect. There is a reason all the big companies left RealPlayer and their proprietary file format to the wayside... So yes, obsolete or at least obsolescent.
The first movie I had ever...uh...*cough*YARRR*cough*ed was on rm. It was indeed awful. Dunno if that's the reason or because it was with dial-up...or both.
