Serving Real Media

1. Make sure that the web server on your VPS is configured to properly handle the Real media file extensions, namely .rm, .ra, .ram, and optionally .rpm.
   
   If your VPS was set up later than December 15, 1997 then your ~/www/conf/mime.types file includes the necessary MIME Types. If your VPS was set up prior to December 15, 1997 then 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 VPS 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 VPS 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 VPS. Real media files should be stored in the following directory, according to your VPS O/S.

   FreeBSD & Solaris
   
   ~/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 domain name of your VPS 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

Audio Clip Example       Video Clip Example