Joho the Blog
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June 06, 2004
Dear Rob, I heard your talk at Esther Dyson's PC Forum about the importance of getting the defaults right, so it's with rueful irony that I spent five minutes this morning trying to figure out how to keep your product, the Real player, from auto-loading every time I start Windows. I must have pressed some well-disguised button in my previous session because when I restarted XP this morning, the first thing to load was your AOL-wannabe entertainment center. "All" it takes to keep it from auto-starting is: Go to Tools-> Options and then Auto services->Message Center->Configure Message Center. Then uncheck everything. And even then I'm not at all sure I turned off "Launch at start up" because there's no box with a label like that. I may have only turned off the Message Center and I don't kinow what the Message Center is although I'm sure Real doesn't have enough to say to me that it requires its own special messaging client. I use Real because there are streams encoded only for the Real player. I don't want Real at the center of my entertainment universe. I don't even want Real in the middle of my screen. So, Rob, please get the defaults right. And no matter how right you get the defaults, please make it dead easy for us to change them. The whole experience makes your product look sleazy. PS: Please don't tell me that Real has hijacked my file associations. Again. Your pal, The David Weinberger Message Center Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 6, 2004 09:10 AM
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Comments
really.
i'm actually happy with the basic performance of realplayer. loads fast, sounds good enough to me. what it's supposed to do it does real well.
but then, yeah, it wants to be ever present.
startup control panel and, especially, startup monitor, from www.mlin.net,have been very helpful. without them, real would not live on my computer.
Posted by: kim | June 6, 2004 10:57 AM
I'm with you, David. The only reason I have RealPlayer on my computer is because that's the player some (idiotic) providers use. I think it's beyond terrible, and I loathe the attempts to send me unsolicited messages and such. Augh!
Posted by: Terry Heaton | June 6, 2004 12:17 PM
I googled "RealPlayer worse Microsoft" and the first page was the Download.com user review page for RealPlayer:
http://download.com.com/3302-2139_4-10255189.html?pn=1&fb=2
Every review on the first page was thumbs down. Overall, 44% were bad reviews.
Posted by: mark | June 6, 2004 01:07 PM
I don't like real player much its a pain with its continual message pop ups of the latest albumn or song on the desktop.I much prefer winamp wich plays your songs hassle free and doesnt hog the resources
Posted by: Zoey | June 6, 2004 05:16 PM
How to make RealPlayer 10 behave nicely: http://www.pmbrowser.info/hublog/archives/000664.html
Posted by: Seb | June 6, 2004 08:24 PM
I used to administer an online audio / video community where everything was served / played in Real (started with RealServer 2 beta back in '96), and by 2001 or so, the client hassles with RealPlayer / RealOne almost brought the whole community to an end by so incensing the members (same issues you mention in your post)!
Fortunately, Real released many of its codecs into open source (Helix) and now there is this "Real Alternative" player that handles at least most of what you need and otherwise stays out of your way. I've switched and recommend it.
Anil Dash has a good commentary on Real Alternative with links to the download page:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/01/08/a_real_alternat
Posted by: Jay fienberg | June 6, 2004 08:50 PM
This is all because Apple won't license FairPlay to Real, I'm sure.
Posted by: Brad Hutchings | June 7, 2004 06:07 PM