A friend has a Pentium 300MHz with Windows 98 and a 56K V.90 SVD modem. Windows Media Player 6 and RealPlayer 7 are installed. When attempting to play the video a window comes up asking you if you want to use Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. When anything other than ‘RealPlayer SureStream’ is selected, an error message appears indicating that ‘RealPlayer SureStream’ has to be selected. Selecting ‘RealPlayer SureStream’ as the video player just gives the ‘Contacting host: activate…’ window but no video or any indication that data is being transferred. Then clicking on ‘Options’ (under the link to the interview on the website) shows the video player selection box with all player options active. Selecting RealPlayer 56k or Windows Media Player 56k both lead back to the error message. He was using Internet Explorer 4 and has upgraded to IE5 but the problem has remained the same. Can you suggest any way to play these videos?

I had a look at the site in question myself and tried to play back the video and it worked fine. From this, we can assume that your friend’s problem is due to something client-side rather than server-side. Firstly, have a look at this URL at the RealNetworks internet site: service.real.com/help/faq/top5/rp_cannot_connect.html. This page shows the most common reasons why RealPlayer cannot connect to servers and how to make the connection. Secondly, try upgrading RealPlayer to the newest version (which is now RealPlayer 8). You can download this from www.real.com. If you have tried the previous suggestions and are still having trouble, I suggest that you contact RealNetworks Technical Support. You can do this from service.real.com/help/call.html.