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Like Tim-H, I don't know about it anymore, but for the few years when I tried to use it, I endured a lot. I'm still bitter about the hours and hours of headaches I suffered. The symptoms were the same on all the computers I used it on. They would always run slowly after installing RealPlayer, it would lock up the computer randomly, and often crashed just after it finished doing anything, such as download enough of a file to start playing, or after it finished playing the file. The interface was horrible and had no useful features, plus it was the only thing that played those formats - which were no better than the MPEG-based formats, and it's not like those weren't available at the time. Real Networks dumped a ton of money into pushing their product and that's the only reason they still [barely] survive against a handful of other thriving, yet under-funded products and formats which are superior in just about every way. I simply don't use their products or formats and I hope they go out of business. It would be better for the whole world if they did.
I feel similarly about Adobe Acrobat. Just like RealPlayer, it also has a gazillion bugs that causes all sorts of ill behavior in the Windows environment, and it's also inferior to many other formats. I can't tell you how many times I've been sent 10MB PDF files that can be reduced to 100KB text files. I hate having to wait for the Acrobat plug-in to load so I can view two lines of text. I'm just waiting for some hackers to get really pissed off from trying to use Acrobat, and target that product specifically.
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