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.

   If your Virtual Private Server was set up later than December 15, 1997 then your ~/www/conf/mime.types file includes the necessary MIME Types. If your server was set up prior to December 15, 1997 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, according to your server O/S.

   • FreeBSD & Solaris
     ~/usr/local/real/Content

   • If you don't know the Virtual Private Server O/S, try the following:

     • Which O/S Is Your Virtual Private Server Running?
     
     

   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 domain 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">

Working Examples
The following links are actual examples which implement the instructions included on this page. Go ahead and try them out! The video clip example takes a little bit longer to start.

Please note: the information on this page applies to ITS web hosting plans. It may or may not apply to other environments. If you are looking for a feature described here, or better support from your hosting provider, please consider hosting your site with ITS!

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