Baofeng Video and the RMVB Era: Universal Players, Codec Hell, and the Freedom to Watch

The previous piece, “The Era of MP3 and TTPlayer,” was about listening; this one is about watching. The other half of the hard drive belonged to movies: Prison Break, Friends, the complete works of Hayao Miyazaki, and those resources whose filenames you would never dare share publicly. But back then, watching videos came with a threshold everyone tripped over at some point: double-click to open, sound but no picture; or picture, but green. You were missing a codec. As for which one, heaven only knew. In the old catalog pages restored by the Winzheng Software History Archive, every weapon from that era of “codec hell” is still on the rack.

Codec Hell and the Temptation of “Universal”

Start with two numbers. Media Player Classic V6.4.9.0 Simplified Chinese Version, five stars from the editors, 1.5 MB—the catalog description was clear: “extremely compact, requiring only a single main program,” able to play all formats supported by WMP, and “not even GIF animations are spared.” Meanwhile, Baofeng Video V3.5 Universal Edition, also five stars, was 34.8 MB. What made up the extra 33 MB? Codecs. Early Baofeng Video was essentially MPC wrapped around a whole pack of codecs: FFDShow—described as “worthy of being called an all-purpose decoder and encoder”—the DivX Decoder, plus the packaging philosophy of something like K-Lite Codec Pack. K-Lite’s description put it bluntly: “Install it, and your player can handle the vast majority of audio and video formats.” Experts assembled MPC plus codec packs themselves; ordinary users installed Baofeng. “Install Baofeng, and everything plays”—to anyone tormented by green screens, that was the most moving ad slogan of the era.

The RMVB Dynasty

What created all this demand was a format that is now dead: RMVB. RealNetworks’ streaming media format, transformed by an army of grassroots transcoders, could squeeze a 90-minute movie into three or four hundred megabytes—two films on one CD, a whole cinema on one hard drive. The spoils hauled back from the download-tool wars had the .rmvb extension more often than not. The official RealPlayer v11 Simplified Chinese Version sits in the archive with four stars, but not many people truly used it to watch films—its historical mission was to provide codecs. Subtitles were another front: Shooter.cn built the largest subtitle library on the Chinese internet through user uploads, while fansub groups’ finished “subtitled releases” and the opening disclaimer, “For study and communication only; please delete within 24 hours,” became the opening line of a generation’s viewing memories.

The Korean Twin Stars: The Archive Tells Its Own Sequel

Enthusiasts’ choice came from South Korea. KMPlayer V2.9.3.1428 Multilingual Official Version, five stars from the editors, had filter and external plug-in management so powerful it felt like an audiovisual laboratory. As usual, the community stepped in: the green beautified enhanced edition, after being stuffed with skins and codecs, reached 30 MB—nearly twice as large as the 16.9 MB official version. Readers of the previous pieces should be very familiar with this kind of enthusiasm. Even better is the sequel, which the archive itself tells to the end: the catalog page for PotPlayer 1.4 beta Chinese-localized version states plainly in black and white that “this is a player completely rewritten in C++ by KMPlayer’s original author, Kang Yong-Huee, after he moved to Daum.” After the original author sold KMPlayer to Pandora TV, he left and started anew. This famous episode in player history is preserved intact in a piece of software copy from 2009. Incidentally, the old article archive from that year also includes a piece titled “Let eMule Play While Downloading: Associating the Player with Kmplayer”—what later became the standard experience of watching while downloading was first cobbled together by users through configuration tweaks.

Baofeng’s Decline and Tencent’s Customary Entrance

Baofeng unified the novice market, then began collecting rent. Pop-ups, news feeds, bubbles in the lower-right corner—that startup line, “Baofeng has always been working hard,” became a meme. Users were waiting for the movie; Baofeng was working hard to load ads. The evidence chain in the archive looks just like the previous stories: the official side released marketing gimmicks such as the “1-on-1 Special Edition”, while the community busied itself with versions like the snowy2004 optimized installer edition. When a media player needs to be “optimized for installation” by netizens, that alone is a medical record. The old editors also wrote “Four Little-Known Tips for Baofeng Video,” teaching you how to use the tool efficiently through the cracks between ads. Then came this series’ recurring segment: Tencent entered, as usual. QQ Player v1.0 Beta2, added to the archive in February 2009, received five stars from the editors. Its weapon was exactly the same as TTPlayer’s back then: clean, lightweight, and ad-free. In Baofeng’s most bloated years, QQ Player truly won its reputation through the product itself. In previous pieces, Tencent won against Lianzhong and lost with Xuanfeng; this time, its product won—but don’t rush to write the ending yet.

No Need to Download—Just Watch

The bigger change was not “what to watch,” but “how to watch.” P2P internet TV changed the rules: PPS Internet TV—1.9 MB, five stars—PPLive Trial Version, and Pipi HD Movies and TV—3.3 MB, also five stars. No need to finish downloading: click and watch. Even if the dorm-room connection stuttered like a slideshow, people still finished entire dramas. The old article archive even has practical tutorials such as “Breaking Through ISP Restrictions for Smooth PPStream Internet TV Playback”—bandwidth was scarce, and smooth playback had to be earned with technique. The download camp was converging too: the changelog for Xunlei Kankan Player included “online intelligent subtitle matching.” Downloading, playback, and subtitles became a one-stop package, and Xunlei, the protagonist of the previous piece, had reached into the living room. The atmosphere on the eve of the copyright era is all in the details: the description for the PPS Video “Ad-Free + VIP” edition carefully explained how to watch the “European and American Theater” without logging in; the description for the QVOD ad-free lite edition was simply a grassroots modification note—“removed the text ads below the progress bar, the ads while loading videos, and the ads when pausing playback; blocked updates”—with a list of known issues and a smiley face included. The prosperity and hidden risks of the gray zone were all written into these entries.

The Edges of the Arsenal: Freedom Through Transcoding

The freedom to watch had one final mile: mobile phones, MP4 players, and the PSP. So transcoding tools flourished for an entire era. The description for FormatFactory V2.15 opened directly with “an all-purpose format converter,” converting all kinds of video to 3GP, MP4, and AVI; the five-star MediaCoder Audio/Video Transcoding Express served enthusiasts. Tutorials like the old article archive’s “How to Use FormatFactory” saved countless nights of “why won’t it play after I copied it to my phone?” The word “universal” appeared with astonishing frequency in that era—universal players, universal decoding, universal converters—because the Tower of Babel built from media formats was simply too tall. Whoever promised to settle everything for you won.

The Endgame: Copyright Libraries Beat Players

What ended all of this was copyright. In 2012, Youku and Tudou merged; the next year, PPS was absorbed into iQIYI, and PPTV sold itself to Suning. The P2P icons for internet TV disappeared from desktops one by one and turned into the “big four video sites” inside browsers. In 2014, QVOD was investigated and shut down; two years later, the courtroom defense that “technology is innocent” sparked debate across the entire internet, drawing a final line under the gray era. That same year, Shooter.cn closed, and its founder left the line: “The era that needed Shooter.cn has passed.” Baofeng Video did enjoy a moment of glory—listed in 2015 as “the first internet video stock,” it hit consecutive daily limit-ups and became a speculative star on ChiNext. Then the bubble burst: in 2019, its founder was arrested, the company was delisted, and that line, “Baofeng has always been working hard,” finally could not keep working hard. As for QQ Player, the best-regarded of the bunch, it briefly “came back from the dead” with an update after years of stagnation, then fell silent again. The product won reputation, but not the era: the name under which Tencent truly won this war was Tencent Video. The final winners among local players were two that “didn’t make money”: the open-source VLC and the still-free PotPlayer. The ones that survived, fittingly, were the ones that did not take ads.

Epilogue: What “Universal” Taught Us

Looking back, the “universal player” was a promise that hit the era’s pain point with precision: chaotic formats, complex codecs, and users who only wanted to double-click and watch. Whoever kept complexity for themselves and handed simplicity to users found a home on hundreds of millions of computers—until they began handing users ads as well. Back then, internet users looked at editor star ratings to avoid bloated players; today, developers look at independent evaluation data to choose large models. The logic has never changed: many promise to be “universal,” but few withstand testing.

The original catalog pages for these players and codecs—version numbers, file sizes, editor ratings, and the descriptions from back then—have all been restored and brought online in the Software History Archive. The three old tutorials cited in this piece come from the archive’s newly opened Old Articles Archive, where more than 2,700 software tutorials and news items from that era are gradually being recovered. The archive is only for historical preservation and research, and does not provide any downloads. The first six pieces in the series are: “The 2008 PC Installation List,” “The Freeware Revolution in Antivirus Software,” “The Input Method Wars,” “The Internet Café Era,” “The Download-Tool Wars,” and “The Era of MP3 and TTPlayer.” Back then, to watch a single film, what was the most media players you ever had installed at once? Drop the old secret signal in the comments.