D: All Things Digital is over, and I'm still catching up on news from the show. This afternoon, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser demoed a new version of RealPlayer--to be released as a beta in June--that adds the ability to download video that's normally available only in streamed from Web sites and save it to your hard drive for later playback in RealPlayer.
There's nothing earth-shaking about that--utilities such as KeepVid and the Firefox extension Video Downloader have offered similar functionality for quite awhile. But Real is aiming for something close to universal compatibility: It says its feature will work with video in Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, and its own Real formats. And the mere fact that such a widely-used program is offering this capability may make it more mainstream.
Sometime after the initial release, Glaser said, it'll follow up with a version that allows you to sync the videos you've downloaded onto an iPod.
Walt Mossberg asked Glaser a question that I wondered about instantly myself: Is this all legal? Glaser said that Real respects DRM if it's there and won't let you download copy-protected video. As for non-protected video, he said that Real takes no stance--it's up to the user to ensure that he or she is using the product for legal purposes.
In other words, I'm still not sure whether it's kosher to download and preserve, say, a copyrighted clip from YouTube. But the chances that anyone will come after you if you're only doing it for personal use are presumably slim.
Real's implementation of this idea looked slick in the demo: When it finds a video it can save, a little button appears over the video window. Click on it, and you can download.
If you're one of those people who thinks of RealPlayer as a program that's hard to download and install and which mucks up your system in various ways, the new version may still be worth investigating: Glaser says getting and using it will be a smoother process, although he didn't provide details. To be fair to Real, its current version is already no more irritating than a heck of a lot of other free applications...
