>>>>I cannot get Real Player to understand I do not want it to own everything connected with audio/video. I have un checked everything and Real Player does not believe me. What a pain! It just grabs what I try to play and takes over.
>>>
>>>Thanks for reminding me - it was accidentally (kids) installed on my machine, and I've just uninstalled it now. One of those... for me, Real is a dead format. If anyone is publishing sound or images in non-standard formats (meaning mp3, mpeg), that's their problem that I can't get them.
>>>
>>>At least Real Player had the decency to do a clean and neat uninstall, to differ from the wild weed like NetMeeting or Outlook Express, which are totally non-Windows-compliant as there's no uninstall for them, unless you do a few dirty tricks.
>
>>FYI, RealPlayer on Linux is RealBehaved. No problems with it at all. It is just another app and I control mime action.
>
>I'm wondering how old is that version. The Windows version was tame six years ago. They looked like "we give the player for free because we're making money on servers", and there was no hint as to what it would become later. Just like free mail on Yahoo - they never said they'll charge you for anything except the extras; all of a sudden there's a charge for POP3 access, which was free before.

The version is 8.0.3.412


>
>Maybe it's just me, but I generally give up anything that starts as a free service and then starts forcing me to either pay or starts pushing advertisements on me. And it's not the bandwidth or diskspace that I'm concerned with - it's the effort they force me to make to get past the ads to find the content I'm looking for.

I never have ad problems with the Linux version of RealPlay8 .
(You'll love Linux. ;-)
JLK