The "network problems" error was a red herring.
After installing RealPlayer, I got the video (MIT .ram
and Wes' local example) to play... without sound, but
I know that's a local issue -- another one of the doesn't-
work-out-of-the-box things that I haven't bothered to
try setting up on this OS yet.

Thanks for the tip Wes.
Ernie

Wesley Alan Wright wrote:
> The MIT video play just fine on my Mac here on Campus in the Lafayette 
> cubicle farm.
>
> You might want to try the RealPlayer for Linux
>
> http://www.real.com/linux/
>
> The MIT video is delivered using the RealVideo 8 codec 
> (compressor/decompressor). This is a proprietary codec, and may not be 
> recognized by HelixPlayer. See
>
> https://player.helixcommunity.org/2005/help/helixrealfaq.html
>
> If you want to double-check if your problems are local or global, try 
> viewing this UVM video
>
> http://real.uvm.edu:554/ramgen/pass/vgrs07.rm
>
> On Nov 15, 2007, at 11:01 AM, Ernie Buford wrote:
>
>> FWIW, on an RHEL4 system, when I click on the link Firefox opens
>> the file with Helix player, but I then get messages saying connection to
>> server lost... "you may be experiencing network problems"....
>> (I haven't tried other .ram files on this system.)
>
>
>
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