Back in the glory days of the internet – around 1996, to be exact – Real Player was actually quite an accomplished piece of software. The VLC of its day, it could play a variety of formats reasonably well, and was great for streaming web content way before anyone had heard of YouTube. Then RealMedia decided to add some annoying nag screens. Then a music ripping program. Then a burning program. Then internet channels and radio…. It all got a bit messy.

The state of RealPlayer today is that it’s well known as being the flagship of bloatware – an application that tries to do much and ends up doing everything half as well as standalone application, so it was hard to get excited when RealPlayer announced yet another update to the product line. Still, we checked it out hoping that RealMedia had finally learned its lesson and began to emulate its much more streamlined, faster and nicer looking peers.

Rather than taking away though, RealPlayer have simply added again – this time a method for downloading video from sites like YouTube. To be fair, it does this very well and you can very quickly throw a video from YouTube onto your iPod or 360 for example. It’s encoding is quick and its options are plenty. However, while it does nothing wrong it doesn’t offer anything different to the variety of programs that have been able to do this for years.

If you’ve never converted web video before but have always wanted to, SP might be worth a try. However, if you know your way around video encoding or don’t feel a media player needs that particular feature, there’s little to offer you. One day RealPlayer might start sorting out its huge list of mediocre features to come up with a killer application, but SP is not that program.