More on RealVideo

Some release of Red Hat Linux (4.1?) included RealEncoder and RealServer. Those were the basis for my first production use of RealVideo. Subsequently, after the Real/Red Hat bundling arrangement was discontinued, I bought a RealServer G2 license and used the Linux version (6.0.3.303) for my own purposes and for Comp Carnage.

I nurtured that copy along with the progression of Red Hat and Fedora releases. Nominally, Real didn’t support that copy on releases beyond Red Hat 7.2, but I had little trouble through Fedora Core 1, as long as I preserved a few older libraries (ld-linux.so.1, libc.so.5 and libdl.so.1).

However, RealServer 6.0.3.303  doesn’t seem to run on the Linux 2.6 kernel, so starting with Fedora Core 2 I ended up maintaining a separate legacy server for RealServer. Soon I just started serving the whole .rm files for production purposes and only turning on the FC1 RealServer for experimentation.

The obvious step, which I finally took, was to create a Fedora Core 1 virtual machine on a production Fedora 7 server. That sort of works, but RealServer 6.0.3.303 seems to get confused with NAT issues on that server, so that configuration doesn’t seem to make sense for production purposes.

I also had purchased a copy of RealServer G2 for Windows 98. I was able to get that running OK in a Win98 virtual machine, but for lots of reasons that doesn’t appeal for production purposes.

However, I discovered that Real was willing to transition my Linux license for G2 to a Windows license and allow me to download RealServer 6.1.3.970 for NT4/Windows 2000. That is running nicely in a Windows 2000 virtual machine. I’ll probably start using that for production soon, but right now I’m pursuing Flash Video for some new production purposes.

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