Helix Player is an Open Source variant of Realplayer, which uses the Helix DNA Client as its engine and only supports open formats such as Ogg/Vorbis and Theora, along with H.263 and uncompressed audio files in WAV, AU and AIFF formats. The player components are released under two licenses by Real, RPSL (which has official OSI recognition) and RCSL (a commercial source code license).

Helix Player's new features include playlist support and the ability to play live streams without fall-out due to a super buffer. Helix Player now also supports Alsa and will play audio content with surround sound. Finally, the developers have also fixed a number of bugs in the player software. Helix Player is available for downloading from the community website.

RealPlayer version 11 is also available as a free download version. It uses much the same codebase as Helix Player, but additionally supports proprietary formats such as Realaudio and Realvideo, MP3, MP4 Audio and Flash 4. The new version of the software also plays Windows media content.