I don’t understand the reasons behind radio and TV stations decision to deliver their contents via Real Player. MS WMA sure, ‘cos it’s built-in to all MS Windows computers, i.e. majority of users out there, but the latest free Real Player is a 5MB download (if, and a big IF, the user can find it), and the server software is also big $$$.
FWIW, the Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server is freely available and runs on cheap Linux servers. One needs Apple’s Quicktime Player to play the sound and video, but then so does Real Server.
Anyway, from Boing Boing, a link to the good free Real Player.
2 responses so far ↓
1 James Mok // Feb 2, 2004 at 4:48 pm
WMA seems to have better audio streaming audio fidelity than RA from the online radio stations I have heard so far. Not sure if they have hit the RA’s limitation or just some technical/financial decisions.
As for video, my limited experiance is only on file encoding without any formal comparison research, which I am not sure if they are the same for streaming purposes, and it seems to me that WMA encoded a larger file to achieve similar video fidelity as RA did. That said, not sure if it has anything to do with this.
2 James Mok // Feb 2, 2004 at 4:51 pm
Corrections – it was actually Windows Movie Maker that I have encoded video files in, not WMA.