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City Council ditches RealPlayer for online meeting streaming

By adamg on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 1:43pm

City Councilor Michelle Wu breaks the news: On April 6, the City Council moves from RealPlayer streaming to YouTube streaming - and closed captioning - for its meetings and committee hearings.

Neighborhoods: 
Boston
Topics: 
Politics
Technology
Free tagging: 
Michelle Wu
City Council


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Comments

By MattyC on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 1:46pm.

What about plaintext stenographers reports?!?!?!

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By Refugee on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 1:54pm.

Dude, that's not your line.

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By theszak on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 4:10pm.

Intermediary Plain Text Steno Record of Public Meetings of Boston City Council
http://anopenbostoncitycouncil.blogspot.com/

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By Kaz on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:18pm.

http://keepsubs.com/

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By B on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:06pm.

N/t

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By ZachAndTired on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:14pm.

Good god, RealPlayer still exists?! I haven't seen a RealMedia video in what feels like a decade at least.

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By cybah on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:19pm.

!

Some places still use Real Player, for a while, CNN did. Until they realized it sucked.

Youtube really killed real player because RP's money maker was the encoding system. Its easier now to upload a video (or use LiveStream or UStream) than it is to use RP now..

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By Scratchie on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:19pm.

Next you're going to tell me that their web pages no longer look best in Netscape Navigator.

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By cybah on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:20pm.

No.. Netscape Navigator Gold 3.03 or Internet Explorer 4.01

The industry standard for many, many years.

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By Scratchie on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 2:25pm.

A bit of nostalgia for you, Cyb:

http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~quinet/web/netscape-en.html

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By cybah on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 3:00pm.

And this is a geocities page!

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By theszak on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 7:49pm.

Today's East Boston Ballot
http://www.universalhub.com/images/2015/ebvote.png

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By Waquiot on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 3:52pm.

Just write down the two people's names and addresses, since that's what's on the ballot.

You comment has no place here. This is about the close captioning on City Council meetings for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

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By Gary C on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 3:53pm.

And let him upload it.

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By theszak on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 4:12pm.

Thank you! A good idea.

Check out the Sources/Authority/Legislation re Boston Precincts and Wards
http://bostonwardsprecincts.blogspot.com

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By tape on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 4:11pm.

is that RealPlayer apparently still exists?

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By adamg on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 5:14pm.

Was forced to download it a couple weeks ago to watch some City Council hearing because for some reason our RCN cable box was refusing to show us the city-access channels. Took forever to download and install and then, when I was done watching and Xed out of the program, it kept loading itself. And when I went into Windows Task Manager and stopped all the Real processes, its downloader .exe still kept loading itself into memory somehow. Blecch.

There's an open-source app called VLC that can play Real streams, and I've used it before, but for some reason it kept crashing every couple of minutes with the council stream, which is why I finally downloaded Real.

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By cybah on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 8:54pm.

I was going to tell you to use VLC and had a post written, and I was like 'eh' and cancelled it.

But yeah VLC will work in place of Real. It probably just needs an update (www.videolan.org) since its crashing... just download a new version, it'll uninstall the old one first, then install a new one.

I use VLC because the City of Chelsea, streams meetings like Boston does, however they use mms:// feeds.... UGH. Yes folks, there's something worse out there than Real Player... it's Microsoft Media Server!

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By tcf098 on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 4:54pm.

The term "RealPlayer" is uttered for the first time in 15 years.

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By Kathode on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 5:04pm.

never hearing of Flash Player again.

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By Brian Riccio on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 7:03pm.

Flash player set to autoplay is the worst!

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By theszak on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 10:18pm.

Boston City Council could turn on youtube comments!... for greater civic participation.

>"All Comments
> [ Comment icon with forbidden symbol ] Comments are disabled for this video."
https://www.youtube.com/user/BostonCityCouncil/videos

Boston City Council could use social media for furthering civic participation and gathering the widest variety of points of views. Currently Councilors and Council Staff post about moments of pride and attending events rather than encouraging folks to contribute comment.

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By adamg on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 10:54pm.

Have you ever actually looked at any YouTube comments?

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By theszak on Wed, 04/01/2015 - 1:35pm.

or comment about the pulbic meetings videos on http://universalhub.com

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By Waquiot on Wed, 04/01/2015 - 12:27am.

And ended up here.

Admit it, you're a computer program, aren't you.

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By theszak on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 10:49pm.

Bad Determination by Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts didn't Determine correctly that the Additional File fo PlainText is Public because the Additional File to the Steno Record with Abbreviations, Acronyms, Shortcuts for frequently used terms, a Dictionary type File is edited and used in the Council Chamber during the Public Meeting of Boston City Council.

City Contract Article 2.3 "Performance" indicates the Additional File is City Property "City is entitled to ownership and possession of all deliverables purchased or developed with Contract funds. All work papers, reports, questionnaires and other written materials prepared or collected by the Contractor in the course of completing the work to be performed under this Contract shall at all times be the exclusive property of the City." http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1263415-stenographer-contract-fy1...

There's a requirement that Council Communications/Notices and Council Public Records be available for text to speech screenreaders used by visually impaired folks.

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By anon on Tue, 03/31/2015 - 10:44pm.

It's about time! Another advantage of having young blood on the Council.

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