Woes with RealPlayer ???

[Denis DeLaRoca <delaroca@ucla.edu>]

Larry,

Over the weekend I was playing with the Linux Realplayer v8 on FreeBSD 4.2
under linux emulation... it appears to work fine. But then I started to
notice that as of late and from home I have been unable to contact most
Real servers out there -- likely my DSL ISP or his upstream routing
provider has again installed some sort of blocking. I think I established
the pattern by testing with different OSs and platforms and different
ISPs...

Anyway, the exception appears to be that I can establish a session with
the BMRC server. I noticed that those sessions are using http for the
transport and perhaps that's why they work. Is this something that is
forced on the server side or is it up to the client to pick and choose
what transport protocol to use?

Next, I noticed that I was able to play archived sessions at only 34
Kbit/s... strange? So earlier in the day, I tried establishing sessions to
BMRC from School and over Calren-2... got same results, 34 Kbit/s
sessions. This would seem to indicate that your server has been
reconfigured and is not delivering higher bit-rate sessions, ie., the
usual 200 Kbit/s that I used to get. What is going on?

As I mentioned it to you before, we need some utility or tool to
test/diagnose streaming media over particular paths to asses performance,
detect firewall blocks, etc. The broadcast.yahoo.com folks have something
like that in their help page as part of helping you configure your media
player... but we need a tool with more controls than that.

On another topic, you were going to take a poll of BMRC viewers in regards
the "re-buffering " problem tha plagued many of us last semester...
Gregory and I, I think, came to the conclusion that it was a problem
specific to "live sessions". However, you claim that people have reported
it as also ocurring when replaying archived sessions. What's the status on
this? 

Anyway, I look forward to the broadcast on Wednesday!

-- Denis