gee, it's just a shame that REAL sucks. period.

... and nobody (with half a brain, or more) cares.

Realplayer never created problems on OS X and they kept supporting it Mac in its darkest days.

Some PR company making these comments without any sense? I am asking since I can't seem to find logic of "hating" Realplayer on OS X platform.

I stopped using Real player since OS 9.
After installed, it set itself to be a default media player.
I asked RealNetwork how could I change it, never got an answer.
So I removed the whole thing.

RealPlayer is one of the most hated products on all platforms. There are a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons don't really apply to the current versions, but old grudges die hard.

On OS X, it's clearly inferior to QuickTime in terms of user experience. Recent versions have been alright, but for most of its life, RealPlayer for Mac was in the same league as Windows Media Player — that is to say, slow, ugly, feature-poor and terribly un-Mac-like.

I think Windows users feel the same way about it in comparison to WMP (which I assume doesn't suck so bad on Windows).

Linux users obviously hate it because it's completely closed and its files are difficult or impossible to convert to anything more useful. Its native file formats have always been the hardest to work with on any platform. Real keeps things closed, which is frustrating, especially these days when fast, high-quality open standards are so prevalent. (To Real's credit, they seem to realize this, and they're supporting other formats now.)

I seem to recall some rather aggressive nags and ads in older versions, too. (Although to be fair, nothing was worse than QuickTime 4.) And as the previous Guest mentioned, older versions were not well-mannered and tried to impose themselves on you.

And of course, nobody likes paying for something when all its competitors are free (and better). I know QuickTime Pro costs money, but really, RealPlayer is more equivalent to non-Pro QuickTime anyway.

Having said all that, I actually think RealPlayer 10 is a decent program. It still feels a little un-Mac-like, but the interface really isn't bad. When I do have to use it, it doesn't get in my way like it used to. It has some nice features, like brightness control (QuickTime used to have that too, but it disappeared in QT7 for some reason). It's not a half-assed port anymore. It's certainly better than Windows Media Player for Mac ever was. Nevertheless, I wouldn't use it for files that are compatible with anything else.

Also, RMVB performance is really bad, at least on OS X.