A slightly less sucky real player
The first episode of battlestar galactica is officially available at scifi.com for online viewing. In order to piss me off, it’s only available in real media format.
Real has one of the worst track records in customer relations i can think off. Spyware, adware, crippled functionality, crappy and unresponsive interfaces, in-your-face advertising, you name it - their software is known to be user-hostile and many people wouldn’t touch their products with a barge-pole. Interestingly, content providers are regularly suckered into using it as their exclusive distribution format. Why is beyond me, perhaps they hope to keep their bandwidth low by making their offerings less compelling.
With battlestar galactica tempting me to install a real product for the first time in years, i remembered last years meme about a less sucky version of real player provided by the bbc. Even though a real employee called this bs i figured i should try it, at least it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with an even suckier version of real player. You can download the bbc real player here and it’ll redirect you to a page with something like this url: http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html?platform2=Mac%20OS%20X&product=RealPlayer%2010%20BBC&proc=… Notice the product part in this string? It says “RealPlayer%2010%20BBC”. If you get to this page from somewhere else, you’ll be redirected to something like http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html?platform2=Mac%20OS%20X&product=RealPlayer%2010&proc=…, wherein the product part says “RealPlayer%2010″. Looks like you can indeed get a different version through the bbc. I downloaded both files and the bbc-dmg is 6.9mb compared to 8mb for the regular version. The app-files in those dmgs are 18.9mb for the bbc version and 23.1mb for the regular version. I don’t know what the differences between these two versions are, but apparently the bbc player is indeed different and i hope it’s some missing adware&spyware that shoves these 4mb off from the regular version. In any case, as little real player as possible on your computer is a good thing in my book.