Can Helix Deliver the Real Stuff? - Page 2

This is a touchy issue with at least one open-source advocate. Bruce Perens, a self-described "free software evangelist" told internetnews.com he was skeptical of the RealNetworks move because the company is not releasing the actual codecs used to encode and decode software for the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.

"I think the biggest challenge for Real is deciding what needs to be open and what needs to be kept proprietary. When it's proprietary, the open source community does not have enough interest to work with the company," Perens warned. He pointed to Xiph.Org Foundation's open-source initiative as an example of a project that is "truly open."

"If you look at Xiph.org's Ogg Vorbis and the On2 projects, those are entirely free codecs for both audio and video. Combining those projects and some of the things Real is releasing could be potentially interesting. But, we're not going to have Real's codecs for real audio and video. We're getting an object file that can be linked in but not the actual code," Perens said.

Real's Foreman described Perens' observations as "unfortunate" and said the decision to keep the codecs in-house was deliberately made to avoid distrust from the open-source community. "We didn't want to do a bait-and-switch on the developers. If we stuck the audio or video codecs in there, we risked it being viewed as a sham and a ploy. We think the engine is much more important than the codecs," he added.

Perens expects the response from developers to be mixed. "Again, it depends entirely on what they're actually going to be releasing. I know there are lots of programmers who work on their own time and would not want to create things for free. They simply don't want to be someone's unpaid employee. On the other hand, a lot of people work on open source for their businesses and there may be collaboration that pays for everyone. We'll have to wait and see," Perens said.

Lee Black, who covers digital media for Jupiter Research, has also adopted the wait-and-see approach. "The big thing now is whether the developer community will embrace it. This has tremendous upside to RealNetworks. Getting developers to embrace your product and build in and around it is a strategy that can work wonders," Black said. Yankee Group's Ritter agreed. "Real's biggest challenge is the fight to remain financially viable when competing against Microsoft's massive campaign to aggressively promote their "free" digital media software and tools."

Ritter says Helix is a "very important initiative for Real," but warned it is not the only lifeblood of the company. "They are right to be targeting the enterprise market because our research indicates the compound annual growth rate of corporate spending on streaming media applications will be more than 100 percent from 2002 to 2004. The ease of deployment and use of the Helix server will be a key driver of corporate adoption and Real will need to do a better job of communicating that message to enterprise buyers," Ritter added.

For Perens, anything that offers legitimate competition to Microsoft "should be encouraged" but pointed to the problems Netscape faced when it ultimately lost the browser war to Microsoft. "Look at what happened with Netscape. They've been practically wiped off the face of the earth except for Mozilla, which unfortunately took too long. Real is trying to get something done but on a different schedule and it's important they stick around. This is important. Any credible opposition to Microsoft in the market is important. Microsoft needs competitors," Perens argued.

Ritter agreed Real was facing an uphill battle but noted the company had an incredibly strong presence in the consumer market, which they continue to grow and capitalize on. "This continuation in growth will be critical, from a revenue generation standpoint more than anything else. They're going to need huge piles of money to throw at sales and marketing initiatives to really compete effectively against their rival in Redmond."

While the latest Real doings are bound to raise the level of the debate up a notch, developers are keen to see what will actually be included in Tuesday's release. For now, this is what is known: The Helix DNA client will contain support in source code form for the MP3 and AMR data types.

In addition, binary-only support will be provided for RealAudio G2, RealAudio 8, RealVideo G2, RealVideo 7, 8 and 9. In the future, the company said it "may be able to release support for SMIL, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PCM, AVI, WAV, AU, RealText and RealPix.

The code for the DNA client is also expected to support streaming over both TCP and UDP, to provide support for a wide range of usage models and support the playback of local files, in addition to Internet streams, for supported file formats. These formats include 3GPP and RealMedia (binary-only), according to notes on the Helix Community site.

The company said the Helix DNA client would include modules to support audio mixing, resampling, volume handling and management, windowing and alpha-blending of multiple visual data types and it is expected to offer APIs for developers to create plug-ins to support their favorite file formats or client renderers.

As part of a deal with Xiph.org, the DNA client will support the Ogg Vorbis audio codec, to provide a complete open source streaming audio player framework.