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Old 7th January 2004, 18:16   #20  |  Link
karl_lillevold
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Seattle
Posts: 1,584
Thanks for all the good feedback and questions! Enough to start a small FAQ already..

Some answers, hopefully I did not miss too many:

@AAC enthusiasts: AAC and HE-AAC questions
The current ripping format is AAC wrapped in RM (.ra), but raw AAC and HE-AAC (ADTS) play back without problems. AAC wrapped in MP4 also used to work, but it was decided to not include it in this Beta version, since we do not currently also play back MP4 video, due to licensing issues. If you happen to obtain our MP4 renderer, MP4 wrapped files will play back. RealPlayer 10 does not currently rip to HE-AAC, frankly because it was too expensive to license it, as well as problems obtaining HE-AAC codecs for all devices we need to support.

@Pamel:
I presume that the Real container bitstream has not changed? (Still on 1.0?) I was just wondering if any of the extraction tools would need to be altered.
container format should be the same, I have not yet tried much AAC encoding, or extraction, but will.

@D-C:
does the rv-aac codec support 5.1 output ?
No 5.1 for AAC. Perhaps later. The Multi-channel codec is still RA8 based.

@datascab:
How long before us mere mortals can enjoy Real 10 (audio/video) without shelling out for the plus version.
A "Helix" Producer will be out shortly. Personally I wish they did not have a Basic/Plus differentation even for the commercial version of Producer. The Basic version is crippled enough to not be useful for anyone but the most casual user.

Does the new AAC based encoding still require the downsampling to 44.1kHz?

I think so. Will check.

Has rmeditior been changed at all, specifically allowing lossless cut and join?
No.

@LiFe: Historically, we have released a new video codec every two years, but there is nothing to stop this trend from changing with for instance RV 11. What's new with RV 10, is that it uses the same bitstream as the previous codec. This is a great advantage for content creators who do not like to change formats that require a player update, as well as hardware device porting.

@iwod:
Vp6 is currently leading the game in Low Bitrate encoding where RealVideo has nearly NO serious competition at all in the past.
In terms of PSNR in Sagittaire's latest test, VP6 leads by a small margin, yes. In general, as you know, subjective opinions vary greatly, and other views have been posted. Personally I think VP6 is RV10's closest competitor in terms of compression efficiency. On2's very skilled codec developers have made great progress.

@DAvenger: Install (uninstall) problem. How to remove old players and codec packs
Weird problem. I am sure QA ran the installer uncountable number of times without running into this, or it would have been fixed. Sounds like it tried to uninstall old RealPlayer(RealOne), but uninstaller was missing. Codec pack, perhaps? Not sure what I can do, since I really need some more information to file a bug report. Maybe .r1pclean.exe will help. This should remove all remnants of old players as well as RealProducers and RealServers, hopefully also codec packs, I don't really know.. Use at your own risk.

RealPlayer improvements..
Yes, the UI looks very similar, with perhaps too few changes IMHO, but there are plenty of improvements under the hood. Better and more accurate video playback with less jitter. LivePause and fastforward. Much improved music library. Everything is smaller, faster and quicker, but it was never meant to be a video only player, which MPC and others do so well.

Despite its many features, uses less memory than WMP and iTunes, and does not run +10MB of background services like one of these, name withheld. MPC already works with the new DLLs included in RealPlayer 10. Oh, and did you know you can play the songs purchased from other music stores in RealPlayer 10? I just played a song I bought from iTunes. And of course integration with a long list of h/w devices, as well as the new RealGuide and Music Store.

RealPlayer 10 does not do any attempts to "hijack" your computer. It asks to be player for filetypes once, you make a selection, it never asks again, or tries to recover filetypes. You can turn the Message Center completely off, as well as all auto-updates. I know how annoying previous versions were. This is not perfect, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

However, as has been the case for a while, no one is forcing you to ever run it to play back RealVideo and RealAudio, since there are alternatives for video enthusiasts, but I fear that codec pack installers do not install or uninstall properly, and may really mess up your system. If you want to use another player, install RealPlayer, perhaps run .r1pclean.exe first, if you have a lot of old Real DLLs or codec packs around.
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Last edited by karl_lillevold; 9th January 2004 at 23:53.
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