Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

deltoidmaximus 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.

	▲	kalleboo 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc [0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png

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weberer 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.

	▲	physicsguy 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The BBC here used to put a ton of news content on it, it was pretty forward thinking really!

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reaperducer 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.