One of the dinosaurs of media playback, RealPlayer has been on the scene since 1995. Sometimes it feels like it hasn't been updated since then, no matter what the version number says. Still, RealPlayer 11 beta introduces a major new function and takes care of some frustrating bugs, making it respectable once again.

The player runs smoother than ever, which to some might not be saying much, but if you haven't used it in years, the differences are dramatic. Now the free version of the player has the ability to download videos from the Internet, including Flash-based videos like those on YouTube. Once installed, mousing over an embedded video will provide a pop-up that not only lets you download the vid, but also change its name, the save-to directory, and other options.

The update sees a major face-lift, as well, removing much of the clutter from the downloadable music store. Though not groundbreaking, the RealPlayer music store gets a thumbs up for being easy to use and offering a flexible DRM policy. The new jukebox features let you make playlists, rip CDs, burn custom mixes, and listen to hundreds of online radio stations. The program still suffers from an intrusive installation, but file-type hijacking and upgrade harassment are mostly gone.

The positive steps begun with Version 10 continue in this beta release. Users of earlier versions certainly should upgrade.

I have used Realplayer for a few months. In my opinion, realplayer is beautiful and can play a great number of files of diffrent types.

I used to like RealPlayer, but it became slower and Windows Media Player only got better and better so I don't use it anymore. Using the right codec packs WMP can also play almost every file and if it doesn't I can still fall back on Media Player Classic (I use this as the default for QT en RM movies) and if MPC can't play it then mplayer does (and if mplayer doesn't then the file is corrupt )).

Since I have a lot of space on my computer than I used to, when something asks for RealPlayer, I download and install it. I don't really like to get into multiple players, but I can't help how people setup programs and files, so I just hope to keep up with what player needs used. And I seem to be needing to download and install within Firefox, so it is always a new install... I just try to keep to Windows Media Player... I only really use it for my downloads and a few uploads from my digital camera.

I guess I just am not so excited about players, but I am glad to have them when I need them.

- skedad -

RealPlayer has *always* sucked bigtime. Just use VLC.

I have Real Player 11 on both my Windows and my Mac and that download a video functionality is great, but can be annoying ... I don't want it to automatically download crap ... it even downloads flash files that aren't even videos ... like geez! Stop wasting my storage space :@. Unless they fix it, it won't be my default player for anything except Real media.

That's the biggest pet peeve I have of Real Player.

xboxrulz

I dont like real just because of the reason that the free version has ads for the paid version. Like the EQ. that just annoys me when im using it. But now i just do what wutske does!

I have yet to really see any ads on Real Player ... except for that popup box that comes up every once in a while from their Alert centre.

xboxrulz

I do not like RealPlayer because of previous privacy concerns with their product named RealOne. But even if they have fixed that, it is still a resource hog because it runs realsched.exe at startup, which takes up quite a bit of virtual memory.

The ads on the Message Center is not that annoying because I've disabled it I remember they used to have flashing banner ads on the top of the Web window. The only thing I like is that they can download YouTube videos, but that's pretty much it.

I use iTunes as my default for MP3s, Windows Media Player sometimes. For movies, I use Windows Media Player mainly because it offers various skins and plug ins. When listening to songs, I use Windows Media Player sometimes so that it is compatible with Windows Live Messenger's Music Personal Message.

RealPlayer is installed on my system because some audio files embedded on web pages HAVE to use RealPlayer. Why can't they use a normal mp3?

i hate realplayer because i could swear i just appears on my machines... probably comes bundled with a bunch of crap... but when there's enough free multimedia players, i too see very little use to it whatsoever...

i like iTunes because i can fairly easily convert from .wav files to .mp3 and whatnot (as reason outputs in .wav and .ai only) but it's a slow loader... so i dont like using it...

as wutske said:




either way... i avoid wmp as well... and as such i dislike most file formats... and i'm coming to terms now with FLAC lossless...