[deltoidmaximus]

Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.

[kalleboo]

I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc

[0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png