Comment by MangoToupe
6 hours ago
> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites.
How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]:
> Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer
Ah, I was not a windows user at the time.
Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.