Can I serve RealAudio/RealVideo files from my web site?

Yes you can. Unless you want to live broadcast a TV or radio station, pre-recorded RealAudio or RealVideo is just like any other file. In fact, in recent versions you can "stream" the media (that is, it starts playing as soon as you click the link, rather than when the file has finished downloading) without any special servers.

To do this, you need to create an additional file to accompany the encoded RealMedia file. For example, if your username is billybob, and you have a file called wedding.rm that you want on your website, place the file in your web directory, and then create a supplemental file called wedding.ram. In the ram file, put the compete address to the actual file, like this:

http://www.iinet.net.au/~billybob/wedding.rm

Now, if you link to wedding.ram, it will play wedding.rm in your RealPlayer program.

The reason two files are required is the the "ram" file will pass the responsibility to download the file to your RealPlayer plugin or program - which then knows how to stream the file live. If you just go to the content directly, your browser will download the entire file first, before passing it over to the Realplayer.

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