Helix (project)
Encyclopedia
Helix DNA is a project to produce software that can play audio and video media in various formats, aid in producing such media, and serve them over a network. It is intended as a largely free
and open source digital media framework
that runs on numerous operating system
s and processors (including mobile phones) and was started by RealNetworks
which has contributed much of the code. The Helix Community is an open collaborative effort to develop and extend the Helix DNA platform.
Helix DNA Client is the multi-platform multi-format media playback engine. Helix Player is a media player that runs on Linux
, Solaris, Symbian
and FreeBSD
and is built on top of Helix DNA Client. Helix DNA Producer is an application that can aid in the production of media files, and Helix DNA Server can stream
media files over a network.
and the free and open source software RealNetworks Public Source License
. Additionally, the Helix DNA Client and the Helix Player are licensed under the popular GNU General Public License (GPL)
free and open source license.
Use of the RDT
, the default proprietary Real data transport, and of the RealVideo
and RealAudio
codec
s requires binary components distributed under the Helix DNA Technology Binary Research Use License.
for MS Windows, Mac OS and Linux (since version 10), RealPlayer Mobile, and Helix Player. It is used on Nokia
, Motorola
, Samsung
and Sony Ericsson
mobile phones. According to https://helixcommunity.org, 350 million mobile phones with the Helix client have been shipped since 2004. It is also being used in embedded devices like the Internet Tablet OS from Nokia
, which is found on the Nokia 770, N800
and N810
Internet Tablets. Cingular Video is also based on the framework. Other projects that use the Helix framework include RealNetwork's Rhapsody
online music service, the Banshee
and Amarok
music players, and MediaReady 4000. Helix DNA also manifests itself as the RealPlayer on Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and on Netbooks.
Another project that is taking advantage of the Helix DNA Client is the One Laptop Per Child project. A group of developers from the Open Source Lab
are currently working on a media player API for the project, and will continue on using other Helix technologies to create applications for content creation and content collaboration.
Helix DNA client contains support for the following media formats:
It supports streaming to any device or application that supports the HTTP, RTSP/RTP
, TCP, UDP unicast
and UDP multicast
streaming protocols.
There is also a commercial version called Helix Server, which has more features and supports more media formats.
The Helix DNA Producer contains output support for the following data types:
Developers who want MP3
encoding can license the code from RealNetworks for a fee. There is also an add-on package for Helix DNA Producer SDK with AAC
or aacPlus encoding support.
Helix DNA Producer is also available in a commercial, closed-source version - RealProducer Plus for MS Windows and Linux.
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and open source digital media framework
Multimedia framework
A multimedia framework is a software framework that handles media on a computer and through a network. A good multimedia framework offers an intuitive API and a modular architecture to easily add support for new audio, video and container formats and transmission protocols...
that runs on numerous operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s and processors (including mobile phones) and was started by RealNetworks
RealNetworks
RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of Internet media delivery software and services based in Downtown Seattle, Washington, United States. The company is the creator of RealAudio, a compressed audio format; RealVideo, a compressed video format; RealPlayer, a media player; RealDownloader, a download...
which has contributed much of the code. The Helix Community is an open collaborative effort to develop and extend the Helix DNA platform.
Helix DNA Client is the multi-platform multi-format media playback engine. Helix Player is a media player that runs on Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Solaris, Symbian
Symbian
Symbian is a mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones and currently maintained by Accenture. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60; unlike Symbian OS, which needed an additional user interface system, Symbian includes a user...
and FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
and is built on top of Helix DNA Client. Helix DNA Producer is an application that can aid in the production of media files, and Helix DNA Server can stream
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
media files over a network.
Licenses
The code is released in binary and source code form under various licenses, notably the proprietary RealNetworks Community Source LicenseRealNetworks Community Source License
The RealNetworks Community Source License is a software license. Developers pick this license when they do not want to open source their resultant Helix DNA-based application. RCSL has a free R&D license and commercial terms for distribution....
and the free and open source software RealNetworks Public Source License
RealNetworks Public Source License
The RealNetworks Public Source License is a software licence. It has been approved as a free software licence by both Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative , but it is incompatible with the GPL and the Debian Free Software Guidelines.The RPSL is used by the Helix project.-External...
. Additionally, the Helix DNA Client and the Helix Player are licensed under the popular GNU General Public License (GPL)
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
free and open source license.
Use of the RDT
RDT stream transport
Real Data Transport is a proprietary transport protocol for the actual audio/video data, developed by RealNetworks in the 1990s.Commonly used in companion with a control protocol for streaming media like the IETF's based RTSP protocol....
, the default proprietary Real data transport, and of the RealVideo
RealVideo
RealVideo is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and is at version 10. RealVideo is supported on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and several mobile...
and RealAudio
RealAudio
RealAudio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks and first released in April 1995. It uses a variety of audio codecs, ranging from low-bitrate formats that can be used over dialup modems, to high-fidelity formats for music. It can also be used as a streaming audio format, that is...
codec
Codec
A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...
s requires binary components distributed under the Helix DNA Technology Binary Research Use License.
Helix DNA Client
Helix DNA Client powers many digital media applications, including RealPlayerRealPlayer
RealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.-History:...
for MS Windows, Mac OS and Linux (since version 10), RealPlayer Mobile, and Helix Player. It is used on Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
, Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
, Samsung
Samsung
The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...
and Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB is a joint venture established on October 1, 2001 by the Japanese consumer electronics company Sony Corporation and the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson to manufacture mobile phones....
mobile phones. According to https://helixcommunity.org, 350 million mobile phones with the Helix client have been shipped since 2004. It is also being used in embedded devices like the Internet Tablet OS from Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
, which is found on the Nokia 770, N800
Nokia N800
The Nokia N800 Internet tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia, originally announced at the Las Vegas CES 2007 Summit in January 2007. N800 allows the user to browse the Internet and communicate using Wi-Fi networks or with mobile phone via Bluetooth. The N800 was developed as the...
and N810
Nokia N810
The Nokia N810 Internet tablet is an Internet appliance from Nokia, announced on 17 October, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Despite Nokia's strong association with cellular products, the N810 is not a phone, but instead allows the user to browse the Internet and communicate using...
Internet Tablets. Cingular Video is also based on the framework. Other projects that use the Helix framework include RealNetwork's Rhapsody
Rhapsody (online music service)
Rhapsody is an online music store subscription service, launched in December 2001, and available in the United States only. On April 6, 2010, Rhapsody officially declared its independence from RealNetworks. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version...
online music service, the Banshee
Banshee (music player)
Banshee is an open-source media player, called Sonance until 2005. Built upon Mono and Gtk#, it uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and supports many portable media players,...
and Amarok
Amarok (audio)
Amarok is a cross-platform free and open source music player for KDE, but is released independently of the central KDE Software Compilation release cycle...
music players, and MediaReady 4000. Helix DNA also manifests itself as the RealPlayer on Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and on Netbooks.
Another project that is taking advantage of the Helix DNA Client is the One Laptop Per Child project. A group of developers from the Open Source Lab
Open Source Lab
The Open Source Lab is a group at Oregon State University dedicated to supporting and developing Open Source software. A wide range of projects are hosted at the lab including Gentoo, Mozilla, Debian, and freenode. Development projects include Ganeti Web Manager, Pydra, and Touchscreen...
are currently working on a media player API for the project, and will continue on using other Helix technologies to create applications for content creation and content collaboration.
Helix DNA client contains support for the following media formats:
- Audio formats: VorbisVorbisVorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
, AACAdvanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
, AAC+, M4A, MP3MP3MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
, AMR-NB, AMR-WBAMR-WBAdaptive Multi-Rate Wideband is a patented speech coding standard developed based on Adaptive Multi-Rate encoding, using similar methodology as Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction...
, RealAudioRealAudioRealAudio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks and first released in April 1995. It uses a variety of audio codecs, ranging from low-bitrate formats that can be used over dialup modems, to high-fidelity formats for music. It can also be used as a streaming audio format, that is...
, WMAWindows Media AudioWindows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...
, a-law, u-law and audio containers AIFFAIFFAudio Interchange File Format is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices...
, WAVWAVWaveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...
, AUAu file formatThe Au file format is a simple audio file format introduced by Sun Microsystems. The format was common on NeXT systems and on early Web pages. Originally it was headerless, being simply 8-bit µ-law-encoded data at an 8000 Hz sample rate. Hardware from other vendors often used sample rates as... - Video formats: TheoraTheoraTheora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
, RealVideoRealVideoRealVideo is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and is at version 10. RealVideo is supported on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and several mobile...
, WMV, H.263H.263H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...
, H.264, VC-1VC-1VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M video codec standard, which was initially developed as a proprietary video format by Microsoft before it was released as a formal SMPTE standard video format on April 3, 2006...
, H.261H.261H.261 is a ITU-T video coding standard, ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group , and was the first video codec that was useful in practical terms.H.261 was originally designed for...
, MJPEGMJPEGIn multimedia, Motion JPEG is an informal name for a class of video formats where each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is separately compressed as a JPEG image...
and container formats RealMedia file format, 3GP3GP3GP is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones....
, 3G2, AVIAudio Video InterleaveAudio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...
, ASFAdvanced Systems FormatAdvanced Systems Format is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media... - Description formats: SMILSynchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...
, SDPSession Description ProtocolThe Session Description Protocol is a format for describing streaming media initialization parameters. The IETF published the original specification as an IETF Proposed Standard in April 1998, and subsequently published a revised specification as an IETF Proposed Standard as RFC 4566 in July... - Image formats: JPEGJPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
, GIF, PNG - Protocols: RTSP, RTPReal-time Transport ProtocolThe Real-time Transport Protocol defines a standardized packet format for delivering audio and video over IP networks. RTP is used extensively in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as telephony, video teleconference applications, television services and...
, HTTP, MulticastMulticastIn computer networking, multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computers simultaneously in a single transmission from the source creating copies automatically in other network elements, such as routers, only when the topology of the network requires...
, RDTRDT stream transportReal Data Transport is a proprietary transport protocol for the actual audio/video data, developed by RealNetworks in the 1990s.Commonly used in companion with a control protocol for streaming media like the IETF's based RTSP protocol....
Helix DNA Server
The Helix DNA Server, first released on 22 January 2003, supports streaming of following formats:- RealVideo, RealAudio (.rm, .ra, .rv)
- MP3
It supports streaming to any device or application that supports the HTTP, RTSP/RTP
Real-time Transport Protocol
The Real-time Transport Protocol defines a standardized packet format for delivering audio and video over IP networks. RTP is used extensively in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as telephony, video teleconference applications, television services and...
, TCP, UDP unicast
Unicast
right|200pxIn computer networking, unicast transmission is the sending of messages to a single network destination identified by a unique address.-Addressing methodologies:...
and UDP multicast
Multicast
In computer networking, multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computers simultaneously in a single transmission from the source creating copies automatically in other network elements, such as routers, only when the topology of the network requires...
streaming protocols.
There is also a commercial version called Helix Server, which has more features and supports more media formats.
Helix Player
It is based on the Helix DNA Client. It is available for Linux, Solaris, Symbian and FreeBSD. Users of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X can use RealPlayer, which has similar capabilities.Helix DNA Producer
It is a media encoding engine for creating streaming broadcasts, on-demand streaming content, and downloadable audio video files. The Helix DNA Producer runs on MS Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.The Helix DNA Producer contains output support for the following data types:
- RealAudio 10, 8, G2
- RealVideo 10, 9, 8, 7, G2
- Ogg Vorbis
Developers who want MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
encoding can license the code from RealNetworks for a fee. There is also an add-on package for Helix DNA Producer SDK with AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
or aacPlus encoding support.
Helix DNA Producer is also available in a commercial, closed-source version - RealProducer Plus for MS Windows and Linux.
See also
- Comparison of video player software
- RealNetworksRealNetworksRealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of Internet media delivery software and services based in Downtown Seattle, Washington, United States. The company is the creator of RealAudio, a compressed audio format; RealVideo, a compressed video format; RealPlayer, a media player; RealDownloader, a download...
- RealPlayerRealPlayerRealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.-History:...