It's nowhere near as spywaretastic as it used to be, and in the curent version you can completely kill the message centre. Alternatively, grab the BBC version - that's a special package of it without the spywaretastic goodness.

My main reason for liking RealPlayer is that they understand streaming, and designed their whole player/codec around that. The streaming support in WMV/QT has always felt like an afterthought and 'bolted-on' rather than being a core part of the program.

Yep, AVI is not streamable. Currently, if you want to stream stuff you can use Microsoft/WMV, RealPlayer, Quicktime, or some user-unfriendly mix of ice/oddcast and theora/vorbis (I say user-unfriendly as there's no obvious player for any of those, unlike with WMV/RAM/MOV).

Hmm, they could use MPEG 1 or 2, those can stream over a plain HTTP connection and can be played back with stuff as old as Windows 3.0. I doubt they work particularly well at low bitrates tho.

Same here, in my first year of uni I watched a couple of things on it using a vile 48k dialup (that was two years ago). Even today I take RP streams over WMV or QuickTime as the RP ones cope better with flaky connections.

Come to think of it, the only reason I even have QT installed is so I can use RP to watch QT movies. Apple horribly broke the Win32 QT viewer, to the point where it can't keep up with old (Sorenson) videos on an Athlon/1.5GHz.

You need QuickTit^Hme Alternative :)

Try changing the comment view to "Nested", that expands the entire tree for you.

Oh the tits. :/ Thanks!