29 June 2008

RealPlayer Sucks

Unuseably bad. Fails at its core function, miserably. Just tried to watch a Gary Taubes lecture at Berkeley last year. I let the entire 1hr48min lecture load up before starting because I did not want to be interrupted by buffering. I'd downloaded the latest RealPlayer for OSX. Lots of artifacts from the get go. Audio occasionally dropped out. Before it had gone even 30 minutes, long sections of audio were dropping out completely. The video turned into almost all-artifact viewing, then dropped to maybe 1 frame per minute. There was no network traffic -- this was all entirely cached on my machine, a speedy laptop with gobs of memory. CPU was not loaded, memory was not overused, no network activity. Unbelievable. RealPlayer is shit.

1 comment:

JustJoeP said...

your experience is not alone or unique. I've endured similar pathetic performance from RP, under nearly identical conditions. It is sad. Viva la mediocrity!