The next version of Real Player which is now in beta testing will be able to download flash videos from sites like Yahoo Video and YouTube. You will be able to queue many downloads and then view them later within the Real Player. That sounds really cool but who the heck is going to download this player? Real has been having problems for many years now and this is obviously a desperate attempt to regain there spot in the desktop media player market.
I would never download and install another Real product again. I’ve had to many bad experiences with it installing plugins for browsers and making it the default program for all the media files on my computer, I don’t want that again. However the next version of Real does sound kind of cool. The problem is there are already many programs that allow you to do this already, such as TubeSock and Video Downloader. I can understand that some people would rather use the Real player to do this because then they wouldn’t have to find a player that will play .flv files or find a converter.
Real player should have done something like this when YouTube was just beginning to gain traction, not now when there are so many other options.
Well whether or not you are going to use this program it will be available for download at the end of this month from RealPlayer.com. The Windows version will be available then but the Mac version will not be available until later this year. The Windows version will work with IE7 and Firefox and most likely for Safari and Firefox on the Mac side.
After the jump there will be a video from Beet.tv, check it out.
[via TechCrunch]
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