[Vorbis] Status of Vorbis in Realplayer

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

I'm working with an internet station.  The station manager and I firmly 
believe in Ogg Vorbis.  We already run transcodes of the 56k MP3 stream so 
modem listeners have the opportunity to hear stereo.  We'd like to change 
our primary stream to Vorbis ultimately, but that will involve overcoming 
a number of challenges, not the least of which will be getting all the 
broadcasters to change software.

before we cross that bridge, we need to be sure that most listeners will 
be able to benefit.  Thanks to Illiminable, we have a set of Directshow 
filters which seem to work well for Windows Media Player.  Our last big 
concern is Realplayer and I have to admit to a bit of confusion here.

I don't use Windows, but the station manager has Realplayer 10.5 which is 
apparently pretty recent and apparently is powered by Helix technology or 
whatever it is it says.  But it doesn't want to play our stream, or any 
local Vorbis files.  Am I wrong in thinking that the Helix Vorbis plugin 
was a done deal?  I was under the impression that the Helixplayer for 
LInux and also Symbian could play Ogg Vorbis, so should Realplayer for 
Windows be able to or not, and if not, how far away is this?

Geoff.