Real Alternative: Better Than the Real Thing? Better Than the Real Thing? Adam Stone
It's hard to discuss Real Alternative and its merits without first talking about the bad rap its behemoth cousin RealPlayer has gotten lately.
Once a leading light in the realm of desktop music and video presentation, RealPlayer has taken a beating of late at the hands of users. One online commentary called it "a bulk load of advertisements and marketing research tools." Users say it crashes and stalls and tosses around spyware like confetti.
At one popular user-review site, 44 percent of RealPlayer reviews from mid-November were negative. "The output is horrible in just about any format — it uses more memory and CPU than the other player I have used, the interface is slow to respond, and it seems to crash and/or have glitches often," one user wrote.
Windows Media Player fares little better. Its painfully slow buffering times are a constant goad to users. A confusing, cluttered interface frustrates many, with some users complaining that the most recent iterations of the program have actually made the problem worse instead of better.
With that kind of user feedback, it is hardly surprising that competition would come on the scene. Enter "Real Alternative," a free application from KL Software. Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia and other multimedia files without having to install RealPlayer or RealOne Player from Real Networks.
Real Alternative is a slim and simple advertising-free application designed to easily play most media content, including RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealMedia (.rm .ram .rmvb .rpx .smi .smil), RealText (.rt), and ReadPix (.rp) formats, as well as non-Real media content such as MP3s, MPEGs, AVIs, QuickTime movies, and CD/DVD content.
It also supports RealMedia content that is embedded in Web pages. However, RealMedia .smi and .smil files are not fully supported — usually only the first part of these files will play.
