Well I'm glad to hear that Real has improved the quality of its video
offerings recently. It would perhaps have been more correct to say
that
RealVideo has been historically substandard, as least as far as the
quality of video actually appearing in the RealVideo format, but it is
entirely possible that this will change in the future.
The other end of it, of course, is the pain associated with installing
the RealVideo codec in the first place. On the Windows platform, of
course, Real is at an inherent disadvantage because of Windows Media
Player not shipping with a RealVideo codec. Real should take steps to
make viewing their video less difficult for users. For the vast
majority of users, installing RealOne is the only way they know how to
get access to viewing the video (if there's a DirectShow plugin, you
certainly can't get to it from the web site), and RealOne player by
default is extremely annoying. Most users will never launch RealOne
player at all, instead relying on it to automatically launch, But for
some reason, Real deemed it necessary to install incons for in it:
quick
launch toolbar, start menu, programs menu, desktop, _and_ the system
tray. In addition, it helpfully displays popup advertisements in the
corner of the screen at random intervals. Why would any user subject
themselves to that? And in turn, why would any web site offer video
content in the Real format if they must ask that users subject
themselves to RealOne in order to view it? Even if its theoretically
possible to configure RealOne so that it's not so annoying, most users
will be unable to do so.
I realize of course that you're a codec engineer and so it's not your
fault, and of course rants about RealOne are hardly relevent on
desktop-devel, but it's something that frustrated me greatly when I
first installed RealOne some time ago. It was like driving to the ice
cream shop only to discover that they were closed.
On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 16:36, Karl Lillevold wrote:
Dear Rob,
I have to disagree in that there is little enthusiasm left for
RealVideo. If you would be so kind as to take a look in this forum:
http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=54 you will find a
lot of RealVideo enthusiasm, in fact I will dare to claim that RV9 is
currently the most popular New Codec, by far, among codec
enthusiasts.
You will probably not believe our quality claims, so take a look in
this thread, one of the many independent codec comparisons that have
been posted in this forum:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64789
As you will see the current RV9-EHQ has the best quality among all
the
codecs tested in terms of the objective measures. The codecs included
are RV9, WMV9, VP6, and two very popular MPEG-4 variants, XviD and
DivX. Subjectively, of course, opinions differ greatly and each
codec has its own strength. My point is that RV9 is highly
competitive, and is being improved every month, as you can see from
the news section in my 'sticky' RealVideo Information thread. Now
there is admittedly a lot of bad looking video on the Internet in
general. Much of this is older content, created with old codecs, and
using sub-standard encoding procedures and source material.
In this forum you will also find that one of the main reasons for
this
popularity is that there are now many ways to play back RealVideo,
including a DirectShow wrapper on Windows, as well as advice on how
to
make RealOne behave nicely. On Linux there is the Helix Player
effort.
As a video codec engineer, as well as enthusiastic about video
playback on PCs, I need player choices. In fact, I use an alternative
player myself on a daily basis, since it communicates more directly
with the codec, and it is easier to isolate problems.
And before you send off a quick reply about the forums referenced
above, let me add that if it had not been for the useful feedback
there, many of the recent RealVideo improvements would not have
happened. I have attached a sample list below. There are participants
from all 4-5 leading codec research teams (RV9, WMV9 two MPEG-4
flavors, VP6), and independent tests of the same codecs, all of which
show that since RV9-EHQ became publicly available for testing, is
coming out on top in terms of compression efficiency.
# Sub-titles, RealText
# Native YV12 support in Helix Producer
# Motivation to work on RV9-EHQ and all the great feedback on its
quality improvement.
# Duplicated frame dropping pre-filter (RV9 Animation DropDupe
filter).
# Improved 2-pass VBR in RV9.
# Faster 1st pass when encoding RV9-EHQ.
Best regards,
Karl Lillevold mailto:karll real com
Sr. Codec Engineer | RealNetworks Codec Group
Wednesday, December 10, 2003, 1:38:29 PM, Rob Adams wrote:
On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 13:17, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
Looking at the actual situation, the real codecs are one
of the last to not have been reverse-engineered in some project.
I should point out that window media and sorenson quicktime video
haven't been reverse engineered by anyone -- rather wrappers have
been
written around the windows versions of the codecs to allow them to
be
played in mplayer or xine. This works very well and so there's
really
no reason to bother reverse engineering the codec.
I think that no effort has been applied to perform a similar effort
on
the real codecs because nobody uses realvideo anywhere unless they
also
have some other format. This is mainly because the RealOne player
can
best be described as a trojan horse, slipping its foul tentacles
into
every aspect of the windows desktop, making it a decidedly
unpleasant
thing to deal with. Combine that with the fact that RealVideo is
substandard and you don't really have a lot of enthusiasm left for
it.
Now, if Real wants to try to resurrect itself with a new spirit of
openness I applaud their efforts, but they've got a lot of ground to
make up.
-Rob
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