I have a friend who a while back wanted to make an iPhone app that could play streaming music from various websites (for formats and protocols the iPhone couldn't natively handle). Everything was looking good until they went to talk to Real.
Real didn't even have an implementation for their platform, so like everyone else sane, they simply used the open source libavcodec, from the ffmpeg project, to decode the audio formats they needed (Real, Windows Media, etc). But they figured that since Real Audio is a completely proprietary format, it would be best to get a license from Real anyways.
So they call up Real and ask for a license and so forth. Everything's going great until the guy asks them about the software they'll be using...
... upon which point the guy goes into an almost murderous rampage about how ffmpeg is "stealing the code" and basically tells them that if they use ffmpeg at all, anywhere in their company, Real won't license to them.
And why? Because ffmpeg--legally--reverse-engineered Real Audio and Real Video. The latter of which was the primary point of contention--and the great irony of it all is that Real Video itself is actually a blatant ripoff of H.264, and most of the "reverse engineering" consisted of reading early (publicly available!) drafts of the specification.
I doubt that could be used as proof that al-Jazeera isn't evil outside of tech circles.
Obviously the common person doesn't understand that Real is about as evil as Nazi Zombies as they still willingly use it, despite it being crammed full of spyware/adware and since I stopped using it (about 10 minutes after I started using it over a decade ago) probably malware too.
There was a time where RealPlayer was better than Windows Media Player. I switched to the Mac and stopped using both before I found out if that ever changed.
Generally now almost everyone uses Media Player Classic if they're in a tech circle. Ironically with the right codecs it can play media smoothly from almost any format. It even lets me push 1080p without killing my processor.
By the way, last time I used RealMedia was when I had a desktop computer... back in 2002-2003, I think. Windows 98, then ME, then 2000... still remember RealMedia sitting there.. AGH, pure advertising and crappy software.
... Have they ever done something good for humanity? ... At least they were good at marketing.
Their first version kicked ass, for that time. I wrote some stuff using RealPlayer around 1996 and it was truly amazing to have audio content compressed into file sizes that were actually acceptable for the early dial-up modems.
Remember that this was back in the time hand-optimizing GIF's was still an appropriate thing to do.
I guess that after their first version some business guys took over and ran the company into the ground, which is a shame ...
