Serving Real Media

Once you have successfully installed and tested your RealSystem Server, you are ready to serve Real media content from your web site.

1. Make sure that the web server on your Virtual Private Server is configured to properly handle the Real media file extensions, namely .rm, .ra, .ram, and optionally .rpm. Most likely, your ~/www/conf/mime.types file includes the necessary MIME Types. If not, simply add the following two lines to your ~/www/conf/mime.types file:

   audio/x-pn-realaudio           ram rm ra
   audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin    rpm

   If you download the ~/www/conf/mime.types file to your local computer using FTP, be sure you upload it back to your server in ASCII format.

   An alternative to editing the ~/www/conf/mime.types file is to simply copy the ~/www/conf/mime.types file from the /usr/local/contrib directory on your Virtual Private Server host machine. To do this type:

   % cp /usr/local/contrib/mime.types ~/www/conf

   NOTE: You will need to Restart Your Web Server after making changes to the mime.types file.

2. Upload (in BINARY format, if you use FTP) your encoded Real media files (those with the .rm and .ra extensions) to your Virtual Private Server. Real media files should be stored in the following directory:

   ~/usr/local/real/Content

   These directories are the "BasePath" where RealSystem Server looks for Real media files. You can change these by modifying your RealSystem Server server.cfg file.

3. Use a text editor to create a metafile containing a RealAudio or RealVideo URL. The contents of your file should be in the following form:

   pnm://YOUR_DOMAIN.NAME/MEDIA_FILE.rm

   Change YOUR_DOMAIN.NAME to the omain name of your server and MEDIA_FILE to the name of the Real media file you uploaded to your content directory in the previous step.

   Save the above metafile as a text file with the .ram extension (mediafile.ram, for example). Metafiles should be stored in your ~/www/htdocs directory hierarchy.

4. Finally, reference the metafile as a hyperlink in your HTML document. For example:

   <a href="mediafile.ram">

   <a href="/support/virtual/real/media/sampleaudio.ram">