Sometimes there would be live video on RealPlayer! Except it wasn't really video. It was like short bursts of video fighting to escape from behind an Etch-a-Sketch screen. You'd see someone's face, it would freeze and go grey and all the features would slide off and the player would stop working.
And we all thought that was the most damning thing ever.
Grainy video.
We could convince ourselves of just about anything on grainy video.
See for example: The Second Iraq War
There was a brief period in 2003-04 where they livestreamed radio shows from other countries and I would enjoy late-night listens to Virgin Radio London in the morning. That was the only good memory I have of realplayer.
I remember trying to watch Japanese Dragonball Z episodes in RealPlayer in 1999 and it would have been faster for me to print out the individual frames, assemble a flip book, and learn Japanese to voice it myself
I was just about to come here and say something like that. What a piece of shit that was. I used to call it the surreal player, because it never made any sense.
I used this as a teen...can't remember it being particularly bad but then I used it with a dial-up modem so it was always slow anyway. But I liked the look of it (I used a later version).
We give thanks for VLC, for delivering us from lossy formats and buggy codecs, and freeing us from the burden of predatory monetization in just one aspect of our computerization. Amen.