New Real Player 14.0.0.600

I think that was another issue again (important though). I honestly thought it had promise at one point, it used IE as its browser base & for me, at least, it just wasn't very stable. Like I said, it seemed like a good idea, badly realised. I think it could have potential if a lot of stability problems are resolved.

 

I never experience stability problems with Real Player but then I have not been using it often in the last few years. Real Player was my default media player from 1997 to 2003-04. As you know in that time period almost all media players required you to have codecs on your system so Real Player suited me just fine. Then players like VLC came on the seen and it was rather convenient to have all the codecs built in to the player instead of installing separate codecs for each media file every time you installed a fresh copy of OS. Instead of staying with the competition Real player stuck to the same business model of charging the providers to stream real media on the internet and keeping the free version of Real Player dumbed down and offering a paid upgrade to users who wanted advanced options. Unfortunately this resulted in people moving away from Real Player towards these other free and fully functional media players like VLC etc. When Real Player lost popularity the content providers also moved away from Real media towards other options. The appearance and dominance of Flash also badly hurt Real Player's online business. These reasons combined resulted in the decline of Real Player. Unfortunately the company still insists on the same model of business. I do not know why. So, if there are stability issues in Real player as you mentioned then these are the least of the problems being faced by the company.

 

Yeah, at least. Thanks for all the background info, I was just talking about the freeware version. If they could sort out its problems it would probably be a 'must have' application. I used VideoLan for a while but it can't play sound on 3gp files like QuickTime can. As far as I can remember you could stream online on the freeware version of RealPlayer of about two years ago. I haven't used it since then.