There is some news today about how Real will be releasing a Linux player with support for Microsoft’s Windows Media formats. For example:
Not mentioned: The fact that Linux multimedia players have already supported these formats for years, sometimes through closed source x86-only binary modules, but increasingly with portable, open source modules. I know, the difference is that Real’s player will have more licensed legitimacy. These news article make it sound as though there will be open source code to decode the Windows Media formats. I sincerely doubt that that’s the case (though if it is true, anyone who is still working to figure out Windows Media Video v8 J-frame coding or Windows Media Audio v3: you can stop now).
I’m still frustrated at Real for a plethora of reasons. One of the most obnoxious things they ever did was send out press releases mentioning something about doing something with open source. This would later manifest as the Helix Player (which, the one time I tried it on an out-of-the-box Fedora Core distro, couldn’t even play a PCM WAV file). But the announcements caused the mailing lists of open source multimedia projects to become inundated with impatient queries about why we didn’t have full Real support since “Real open sourced everything.”