Techno Page

With RealOne, RealNet-works has gone all out to create a ground breaking media player. Believe it or not, RealOne actually does feel like a new way of enjoying the Internet. The old RealPlayer was a video toy; RealJukebox was simply a nice way to catalogue and play music; Windows Media Player a solid combination of all those features, but the RealOne goes beyond all three. It's fresh and original.

As with previous versions of Real products, you have to install this application with care, as RealOne will take over all your audio and video settings unless you change file format preferences during installation. Once you're up and running, the RealOne interface consists of a main screen divided into three parts: a presentation area on the top left, where streaming video or music plays; related information on the streaming content on the top right; and a Web browser in the bottom pane. When you start up the programme or press the Home button in the centre of the screen, the Web browser displays the RealOne home page, which highlights streaming content from a variety of sources. Annoyingly, though, a streaming video ad also begins at start-up.

The left side of the Web browser window contains RealOne Topic Centres, including music, sports, entertainment, news, and RealOne Central. Topic Centre pages highlight new content and provide links to category sub-pages. Music, for example, features sub-pages for alternative, classical, and country, and news links to pages for CNN and ABC News. On each page, about half the content is available to basic users and half is marked as premium content for paid subscribers. Premium content includes clips of not previously broadcast material from Survivor (more than 30 minutes of material for each episode), highlights from Fox Sports, and news reports from ABC and CNN. Real has released RealVideo 9.0, so users who upgrade their players will see improved performance with a new video codec. The new codec is said to improve streaming image quality slightly. Videos in RealOne's music area look especially sharp and impressive. Video quality performs relatively well even over a 56k modem. It gets occasionally jerky or blocky but is not all that bad.

Because RealOne is an all-in-one application, it lets you play and create CDs with ease and streams media files too. To play, rip, or burn a CD, insert it into your computer and press the CD button on the bottom of the screen. From the resulting screen, you can either listen to your music or encode it. To encode, press the Preferences button in the lower left corner to set the format. You can create RealAudio 8, MP3, WAV, or Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. (By contrast, Windows Media Player lets you encode only WMA files.) RealOne's basic service lets you encode MP3s at 56Kbps, 65Kbps, or 96Kbps, while premium users can record at up to 320Kbps. This is a big difference if you are serious about sound. (For passable encoding speed, use 96Kbps, but 128Kbps or more is preferred.) Creating a CD is slightly more complex, but overall, both processes are intuitive enough for beginners.

Mobile music fans must see this. RealOne transfers music to 23 different portable devices, including Creative Labs Nomad, Sonicblue Rio, Sony CLIE, and Iomega HipZip, and it includes a radio tuner that serves up 22 genres. Unfortunately, some functions of the radio tuner's search feature, such as specifying the country of origin for the stations you want, simply don't work.

The player's free version includes a barrage of incredibly annoying ads, which often causes the screen to go black; in some cases, it actually changes the RealPlayer layout. Add to that the frequent requests to upgrade, and the price of the free product quickly becomes evident.

Whether or not you want to pay, RealOne Player is worth a try. Plus, you'll get a 14-day free trial of the premium services, so you have every reason to give it a whirl. Unfortunately, Mac owners won't find a compatible version of RealOne until the first half of next year, but I bet it will be worth the wait.

Enhance your computer literacy
HD-DVD - High Density DVD: the next generation optical DVD disc. As of early 2002, the DVD forum was struggling to get agreement on a single standard, with rival proposals for formats specifying single-side capacities of between 9MB and 27MB under consideration.

Joliet - An extension of the ISO 9660 standard, developed by Microsoft to allow CDs to be recorded using long file names, and using the Unicode international character set. Joliet allows use of file names up to 64 characters in length, including spaces.

Red Book - The Philips/Sony specification for audio (CD-DA) compact discs.

UDF - Universal Disk Format: a file system for optical media developed by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA). It was designed for read-write inter-operability between all the major operating systems as well as compatibility between re-writable and write-once media.

The standard allows for efficient recording of small packages of data, using incremental packet writing.

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