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Comment by romanhn | Hacker News Reader

I love the fact that an early digital format for sound recordings is used here for early sound recordings. Fun fact - RealNetworks is still around.

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I knew that, but it always baffles me when I hear it again. Who uses any Real products anymore?

Back in 2007 the only reason I ever used Real stuff was pirated episodes of South Park, and even then I think I was using Real Alternative. Even in 2007 the company seemed like it was dying, and I have no idea 17 years later it's still somehow alive.

It appears they’re mostly buying other companies and their tech, with no apparent whales on either side of the ledger, so they don’t appear to be growing or failing at any great pace.

I remember installing their software reluctantly

I drive by their headquarters in Seattle pretty regularly and always wonder the same thing.

Wait, people were still using Real back in 2007? At that point I had cycled through DivX, XviD, and then just started holding onto the .VOB file from the DVD.

As I said, the only thing I used it for was pirated episodes of South Park. For whatever reason, a lot of the South Park piracy websites were using .rm files.

For literally everything else, I think I used XviD until MakeMKV came along.

Were they really, really bad quality? They might have been leftovers from the 1990s.

I used to download them over a modem.

They were pretty bad quality, not that it matters much for the early South Park.

Probably leftovers from the 90s, though at this point it’s really weird for me to watch the older South Park in high quality.

Realplayer supported SMIL!

Realtime dynamic composition of video streams from multiple servers with a few lines of XMl.

20 years later, there’s no alternative.

Jesus, how do you know that? Did you work there, like me?

Or, did you work for the evil empire (M$) and were you pimping HTML+Time?

Just a random streaming user :) I could share one link that would seamlessly blend multiple short video clips from 3rd-party servers. Today that requires sharing multiple URLs that each load a heavy web page with separate HTML video player, with no playback continuity. Mini movie editing with a text editor and revision control!

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