QT lite and Real Alternative from free-codecs.com do the job very nicely for me without the bloat or constant nagging.

Although I have unchecked "Enable Real Player Cookies" in the preferences dialogue box, and I always delete cookies when exiting Opera, Ad-Aware always finds that Real Player has installed a Tracking Cookie.

it's about time that Real Player was told to stop breaching users' privacy in this way.

since I stopped using this shyteware, just because of this annoying ODRealSched process of theirs that was getting reactivated once in a while despite I deleted it and removed any link to it.

How come you can trust such a company.

Good thing they are named and shamed.

At last !!!!

I have come to accept that most media players (In windows) are resource hogs these days, but Real takes it to a whole new level.

I used to work for a retailer, in their service center, and I would regularly get in computers that the complaint was "Choppy DVD playback" or words to that effect.

In most cases a quick uninstall of RealPlayer would fix it right up.

Only PH would be foolish enought to install RealPlayer.

Do people still install this?

It's almost impossible to get a clean uninstall of this crud once you've got it.

The only conceivable reason I can think of for installing RealPlayer is to get BBC News videos - the sooner Auntie realises embedded Flash video is far more accessible and efficient the better.

RealPlayer is filed under 'Avoid at all costs' in the opinion of every techie I know. The only reason it still exists is because of uninformed users.

Irelands main TV and radio station, RTE has been available on the web since 1994 (!!). Unfortunately, it still only provides RealMedia streams. I've managed to limp by with RealAlternative on my current machine, but that means I can't fast forward or reverse back through RTE streams, functionality that the RealMedia player has offered since version 5 or 6 :-(

do people still use this crap?

it's almost as naff as quicktime

nice to see stopbadware has their finger on the pulse, shame it's a corpse!

paris, cos she has as much clue as stopbadware does

Real Alternative?

i thought real networks had gone the way of the dodo?

What irks me is that a good bit of the BBC's online radio content is still delivered as .RAM files.

Installing this crapware requires a bit of care to go through each stage and untick all the extra guff that they try to install had you just chosen the regular install option.

99%

(it won't let me post a with only 99% below the title as it doesn't recognise it as a comment...)

I spent a period of time trying to make a living offering IT support to home users. It could have worked if I had charged a reasonable rate, unfortunately I am too much of a hippy to ever be succesful running my own business.

Anyway I about 30% of the my computer is sooo slow and keeps bugging me with pop-ups was a simple removal of Real software. Back then I used to carry a USB with a Real Player v8 install (which was no longer available) but once they changed to RealOne it did little good for a lot of content.

Have you ever read the Real license?? I'm pretty sure satan was involved because

it goes way beyond the usual accepted rights buggery and weasleness of the standard software license.

Happily if you want to view RM files these days (thanks for the access BBC bastards . I complain to them regularly about Real software) you can use Real Alternative avalable here..

http://codecguide.com/about_real.htm

Anybody got a wall, an AK47 and a revolution to hand?

I choose thumbs up because that's what Real like to put up people's bottoms

I won't attempt to deny the sins of RealPlayer because they are many.

However, it's still preferable to Windows Media because the player is available for pretty much every major operating system and enables the same streams to play on my Reciva internet radio.

But I'll add my two cents worth.

This software is excellent at honing your registry edit skills. You will need it for the uninstall, à la @Good grief.

I am a bit annoyed because the codec showed great promise at first and I had put money down for it in the past. But when the player and associated parasiteware started to take over my PC, the knifes came out....

But in a few years it will be mandatory, if the EU keeps supporting their complains against Microsoft.

Running Linux, only Realplayer works for BBC radio & video. Although Mplayer is said to work it usually doesn´t and then only intermittently and choppily. Anyone any suggestions?

Give credit where credit is due. Real Player was truly the first widely used method for tuning into streaming media. Its such a shame they crapped all over their decent beginnings and went for more profit over making good software.

to dogpile on Real Player, they were the first with an efficient compressor for video over the WAN. Nothing beat them for a long time.

The BBC don't seem to have caught onto the fact that Iceweasel = Firefox, so for me, the Windows Media option remains available. Many such streams work fine with xineplayer (using ffmpeg's codecs); those which don't are streamed over MS RTSP. (It's a bit odd that they do that – if you can get hold of the stream's URL, you can turn it into an mms:// one and get the same stream that way.)

@garbo

Not only does mplayer work in Linux (and probably Windows), but kmplayer, kplayer and xine all do as well.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/11/32350

That was back in 1999.

Stop icon? Because that is what should come up (full screen) as soon as the Real Player installer is run.

'According to Luckin, Version 11 is one of the only media players to natively run a wide variety of proprietary formats'

It's also bloatware, threw in on once and couldn't wait to get rid of it.

VideoLANs' VLC player, free, light, small & plays just about every audio & video format around. You can also set it up as a streaming server if your that way inclined.

I agree with your headline wholeheartedly. I haven't installed RealPlayer or Quicktime on any of my platforms for the past 5 years. Quicktime and RealPlayer have each been responsible for instability in Windows on several of my systems.

This may be one of the reasons why people think Windows is crap. With these 2 apps loaded - it is, no doubt about it. Do yourselves a favour and don't use them.

You mean there are still people out there who haven't learnt the first rule of Real Player: "Don't install it under *ANY* circumstances!".

Most of us geeks learnt this ages ago, surely this information has filtered down to the hapless masses by now!

Maybe we should convince Paris to publicise this in a charitable fashion.

@ Les Matthew - apparently not, although, to be honest, I don't use that either, as any acceptance or support of the rm and related formats will only delay its death.

RealPlayer on OSX is fantastic. Free, lightweight and no messages, even after you exit the application (or while it's running!).

For Real Networks. I lasted 2 months and couldn't take it any more and quit. It's a strange company. You are either a FTE zealot or navel lint if you work there. They may have been the pioneer back in the day, but lets not forget their tracking habits, and who knows what else they have gotten away with since then. I can't remember the last time I had to deal with a Real Player issue, but this latest development doesn't suprise me one bit. It's the mindset there, mostly driven by Rob Glaser - Psycho! They are so anti-microsoft there its to a fault.

Yeah, but unfortunately, that does involve buying a Mac.

/troll

a useable alternative - it just doesn't support some basic features of streamed RealMedia streams. If you hit the pause button, and then hit play 2 minutes later, you miss 2 minutes of the stream!!!! And you can't fast forward or rewind through a stream either.

Maybe this is just a weakness with MP Classic, and using WMP with the directshow filters will work better, but the bottom line is that RealAlternative isn't an "out of the box" replacement for RealPlayer, unfortunately.

@John -- maybe it works for you, or maybe it works now, for a while, but I can assure you that RealPlayer Hell did indeed extend well into OS-X time.

Side-note. A friend once had a job that involved porting RealPlayer to an embedded "internet radio". Looking into why it seemed such a resource hog it turned out that it threw a _blizzard_ of floating-point exceptions during operation.

Apparently the average PC either is _so_ fast that it doesn't matter, or more likely just disables the exceptions and whatever cruft ends up in the FP regs instead is "good enough". Real Media was, of course, completely un-interested in bug-reports.

If you like tie ins. lock downs, deliberate incompatibility unless you pay upgrade tax, and generally being ripped of. real will be the least of your problems.

It's funny - I was thinking the same thing. I don't understand why the RealPlayer is so 'streamlined' on OSX when it's such a piece of bloated crapware on Windows. I have a feeling that it's because they think there aren't enough Mac users out there for it to be worth them writing another set of steaming shiteware to 'bundle' with the player.

Anyone remember 'Comet Cursor' that used to be bundled with RealPlayer? The software that was practically impossible to remove? And would sometimes reinstall itself spontaneously? Those really *were* the Bad Old Days.

The OSX version of RealPlayer is small, quick, and not a resource hog. Now that more people are using (or at least aware of) the Mac and OSX, how long before that changes?

"If you like tie ins. lock downs, deliberate incompatibility unless you pay upgrade tax, and generally being ripped of."

You mean, like with Microsoft?