p2pnet - rss feed: Apple and Real hack it out
p2pnet.net News Opinion:- Whichever way you look at it, Apple + iPod = ink and bytes.
1 - [quote]RealNetworks Statement About Harmony Technology And Creating Consumer Choice
RealNetworks, Inc. is delighted by initial consumer and music industry support for Harmony[unquote]
2 - [quote]Apple Statement On RealNetworks
We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker[unquote]
That’s it - all of it - captured in four PR-speak sentences.
Bill Thompson puts it another way:
“Real managed to turn the RealPlayer that we all loved when it launched in the mid 1990’s into one of the least usable and most irritating pieces of software ever written, filled with features that nobody wanted, pushing popup ads for their paid-for service at regular intervals and generally annoying everyone.”
And of Apple: ” It sold its integrity to the record business when it agreed to pay their inflated royalties for each song sold from the iTunes Music Store and to lock them up using FairPlay, a proprietary technology which they refuse to license to anyone else.”
While Apple, bloated by media hype, and RN punch each other out, a free, independently developed application (which Apple did its best to crush) has been available in the real world for quite a while. Called Hymn, it lets people play the iTunes downloads they paid for on anything they choose. And there’s Jon Lech Johansen’s FairKeys, “a tool which lets you retrieve your FairPlay keys from Apple’s servers”.
Of Cabbages and Kings
Real and Apple live in Never-Never-Land where the Big Four record labels are Kings with the owners of the various corporate music sites and ’services’ - ie Apple and Real - carrying ‘product’ and dancing to their tunes.
It’s like Farmer Jones growing the same type of cabbages loaded with growth hormones and genetically altered so they’re an identical shade of green, and then offing them in a brutal hard-sell to the same grocers. Because the cabbages have been artificially produced, they’re bland, wormy and tasteless but the grocers - packed together in the same shopping mall - are nonetheless trying to sell them at grossly inflated prices to a very small group of people who don’t know any better, or who just don’t care.
In the UK, Farmer Jones would be called a Wide Boy and you’d see him selling off the back of a truck, one eye open for the police.
In the meanwhile, while they wait for the market to equalize and settle, millions of discerning shoppers who long ago figured out there’s no point in trying to deal reasonably with Jones - he’s congenitally programmed to rip them off - are helping themselves to a huge range of tasty, organically grown cabbages and other produce from an equally vast range of farmers.
Of RealNetwork’s Harmony? Check out the details from Karl Lillevold, RealNetworks’ senior codec engineer, as linked on Johansen’s So Sue Me blog.
Lillevold says here, “As you know, the RealNetworks music store sells songs in 192 kbps AAC (as opposed to iTMS at 128 kbps). When transferring your purchased songs to the iPod, the AAC itself is not touched, but the Helix DRM is transmuxed to a DRM that is compatible with the iPod, i.e. fully protected and without trans-coding. If you then transfer the file back to your PC (for instance with Anapod), you get an M4P file, that is a protected MPEG-4 AAC file.
“I did not work on this myself, I work with video codecs, but this is how you will see it works, after 5 minutes of testing, and is how the press release describes it as well, in less technical terms.”
JN
