Helix DNA is a project to produce

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

that can play audio and video media in various formats and aid in producing such media. It is intended as a largely free and open-source digital media framework that runs on numerous

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s and processors (including mobile phones) and was started by RealNetworks which 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 a software package for multi-platform multi-format media playback. Helix Player is a media player that runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, Solaris, Symbian and FreeBSD and uses the Helix DNA Client. The Helix DNA Producer application aids in the production of media files, and Helix DNA Server can stream 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 License and the free and open source software

RealNetworks Public Source License The RealNetworks Public Source License (RPSL) is a software licence. It has been approved as a free software licence by both Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative (OSI), but it is incompatible with the GPL and the Debian Free Sof ...

. Additionally, the Helix DNA Client and the Helix Player are licensed under the popular

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL) free and open source license. Use of the RDT, the default proprietary Real data transport, and of the RealVideo and

RealAudio RealAudio, or also spelled as Real Audio 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-fi ...

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...

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

RealPlayer RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3 ...

for MS Windows, Mac OS and Linux (since version 10), RealPlayer Mobile, and Helix Player. It is used on

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

and

Sony Ericsson Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. ...

mobile phones. According to https://helixcommunity.org, 800 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 Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to c ...

from

, which is found on the Nokia 770, N800 and

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, like preceding tablets produced by Nok ...

Internet Tablets.

Cingular AT&T Mobility LLC, also known as AT&T Wireless and marketed as simply AT&T, is an American telecommunications company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T Inc. and provides wireless services in the United States. AT&T Mobility is the th ...

Video is also based on the framework. Other projects that use the Helix framework include RealNetwork's Rhapsody online music service, the

Banshee A banshee ( ; Modern Irish , from sga, ben síde , "woman of the fairy mound" or "fairy woman") is a female spirit in Irish folklore who heralds the death of a family member, usually by screaming, wailing, shrieking, or keening. Her name i ...

and Amarok music players, and MediaReady 4000. Helix DNA also manifests itself as the RealPlayer on Mobile Internet Devices (MID) and on Netbooks. Developers from the Open Source Lab announced in 2007 they would use Helix technologies for content creation applications and collaboration in the One Laptop Per Child project. Helix DNA client contains support for the following media formats: * Audio formats:

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...

, AAC,

AAC+ High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for l ...

, M4A,

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

AMR-NB The Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR, AMR-NB or GSM-AMR) audio codec is an audio compression format optimized for speech coding. AMR speech codec consists of a multi-rate narrowband speech codec that encodes narrowband (200–3400 Hz) signals at var ...

AMR-WB Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) is a patented wideband speech audio coding standard developed based on Adaptive Multi-Rate encoding, using a similar methodology to algebraic code-excited linear prediction (ACELP). AMR-WB provides improved ...

, WMA,

a-law An A-law algorithm is a standard companding algorithm, used in European 8-bit PCM digital communications systems to optimize, i.e. modify, the dynamic range of an analog signal for digitizing. It is one of two versions of the G.711 standar ...

, u-law and audio containers AIFF, WAV, AU * Video formats:

Theora Theora 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 contai ...

, RealVideo,

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

, H.263,

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

, H.261,

MJPEG Motion JPEG (M-JPEG or MJPEG) is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, Motion JPEG ...

and container formats RealMedia file format, 3GP, 3G2, AVI,

ASF ASF may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Alabama Shakespeare Festival, a drama festival * ''Asimov's Science Fiction'', a U.S.-based English-language science fiction magazine containing SF stories Science and technology Biological * A ...

* Description formats: SMIL, SDP * Image formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG * Protocols:

RTSP The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams (such as interactive media, video and audio) over a suitable transport protocol. RTSP i ...

, RTP,

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

Multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

, RDT

Helix DNA Client for Android

Helix DNA Client for Android provides an HLS, MPEG-DASH, Verimatrix DRM and Microsoft PlayReady DRM media player for Android 2.2 to latest devices. Supporting H.264 and AAC codecs with Adaptive Bit Rate support (H.264 / AAC) including audio only. Armv7 and Armv6 supported using Stagefright media platform. Helix SDK is supplied as a library which is included within Android Java applications for over the air installation. Helix DNA client contains support for the following media formats: * Audio formats: AAC,

* Video formats:

, RealVideo and container formats RealMedia file format, 3GP * Protocols: HLS (Version 4), MPEG-DASH ( ISO BMFF MP4)

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

/ RTP, TCP, UDP unicast and UDP

multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

streaming protocols. There is also a commercial version called Helix Server, which has more features and supports more media formats. It was originally called the Helix Universal Server when it was announced in or before 2002.

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.Helix Community
Helix Producer Category FAQ
Retrieved on 2009-08-02 The Helix DNA Producer contains output support for the following data types: * RealAudio 10, 8, G2 * RealVideo 10, 9, 8, 7, G2 *

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

Developers who want

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 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for ...

encoding support. Helix DNA Producer is also available in a commercial, closed-source version - RealProducer Plus for MS Windows and Linux.RealProducer Plus Specifications
, Retrieved on 2009-08-02

References

External links

* {{Compression software Free media players Linux media players Multimedia frameworks Symbian software RealNetworks