That's about the best kind of message you can hope for from Real, a company with such a long and deep history of infecting computers that it's product is indistinguishable from a virus.

Posted by: Scott Yates at March 31, 2007 08:30 AM

The Windows version of RealPlayer has been terrible for a long time. Constant nagging about upgrades and other nonsense to just play the rare file that someone just had to use Real to encode. The software is written to assume that you want to use it to play all your media. I got so disgusted with it that I started using RealAlternative. http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

Posted by: ebob at March 31, 2007 09:49 AM

Ah realplayer: a hopelessly dysfunctional media player that does 600 hundred different things badly. This is par for the course for them.

Posted by: steelcobra at March 31, 2007 11:01 AM

RealPlayer? It's probably broken-on-purpose. Everything else about that thing is.

Posted by: J H at March 31, 2007 01:47 PM

Unable to display this post.

Joking aside, I have had a bad experience with them to. I submitted the entry to mh, but it must have gotten buried...

Anyway, I had just installed RealPlayer to watch this thing for CBS' Innertube, and while it was installing, I noticed it said"Installing Firefox..."

Wha? I already have Firefox! I let it install fully, then I checked Firefox. It came up with a message that said my Blue Ice theme was not recognized. Now that was even weirder, and I had an idea what happened.

I clicked the help menu, and clicked on Release Notes. It came up with a web page that told me it was on version 1.5! It freakin' downgraded my Firefox!

I reinstalled my 2.0 version, but, when I opened it, it always crashed because of some Google toolbar addon. I resolved it by going into safe mode and disabling it. Now THAT'S inconvenience!

Posted by: st33med at March 31, 2007 04:58 PM

...and yet it still managed to display some message.

Posted by: dahobo at March 31, 2007 10:10 PM

RealPlayer would have to be the worst program that I have ever used.

I've seen too many computers that take five minutes or more to boot up because of everything that RealPlayer puts into the startup.

Posted by: TIBE4ME at April 1, 2007 10:54 PM

RealPlayer silliness, and general systemic broken-ness aside (which doesn't have anything specific to do with this message)... the error message itself could make sense, if it had been worded differently. As it is worded, it is very broken, and wrong, since that message did display. However, I'm guessing the intent was that the error message was trying to say a different message could not be displayed: "unable to display THE message"

Posted by: Memnon at April 2, 2007 10:14 AM

I agree that RealPlayer is annoying. The funny part is after seeing this post, and removing it, I discovered I didn't need it anyway - everything that I thought required Real (or RealAlternative) to play, actually plays fine with QuickTime. So now all I need is something that will let me play QuickTime files in Media Player - they both are not great interfaces, but I like Media Player better than QuickTime player.

Posted by: Sashazur at April 2, 2007 06:59 PM

This is almost as bad as those stupid pages you find in government manuals that say "This page intentionally left blank."

Posted by: orbhot at May 3, 2007 10:46 AM

realplayer sux i only used it to play videos on the bbc website

Posted by: PC_nut at May 5, 2007 05:15 AM