(This page assumes that the correct version of RealPlayer for your system is installed)
Is the Message Window or is RealPlayer is popping-up BEHIND your browser where you can't see it? Move your browser out of the way and see if there is a Message Window or RealPlayer lurking about (the America Online [AOL] browser was intentionally designed this way)
Perhaps your computer hasn't been configured yet for streaming RealAudio. On your computer, go to where you have your RealPlayer icon and click-on it. OR, if you should have it on a pull-down menu, go there and select it. The idea is to manually start your RealPlayer. Then, you might get a Message Window asking if you would like your computer to search for different ways to connect with your request. What this means is that your computer will search itself to find a way to stream RealAudio. (Your computer will not search for anything on the Internet. That's not the problem. It's the way your computer has been configured.) This internal searching process is called, "Automatic Transport Configuration."
If your computer is part of a company network and protected by a firewall you won't receive Real Media content unless you set up your player to access it via a proxy server. Go to the RealPlayer preferences, select the proxy tab and enter the address of the server where required. You should contact your system administrator or ISP for more details of this address.
During setup of RealPlayer, you may see this and wonder what it is...
A proxy server is a go-between. Without a proxy server, when you visit a webpage, your computer connects directly with the remote web server and retrieves data from it. A proxy server lives on your Internet Service Provider's network. If you set up your browser or RealAudio to use it, then instead of asking for a remote website directly, you will actually be asking the proxy server to collect the page or file for you, and forward it on to your browser. It does this quickly and without intervention.
The benefits of using a proxy server are that once it has collected the remote website, is stores the text and images before forwarding it to you. The significant thing is that when the site is requested again, the proxy will first check to see whether the remote site has been updated, and if it has not been, it will simply retrieve the text and files from it's local storage cache rather reconnecting to the remote site.
This means copies of popular sites are kept within the ISP's local network, so its backbone connections are not saturated with repeated direct connections to the remote server. Because the site is retrieved locally, it is also retrieved more quickly. The benefits, therefore, are that capacity of the provider's backbone is not wasted, and cached sites download more quickly.
It is generally safe to use a direct connection - a proxy is not necessarily a firewall, so it does not give your computer any particular protection. Indeed, there are occasions when the proxy is playing up, not updating its cache properly perhaps, where you might prefer to use a direct connection.
The player says "Buffering"
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A 'No DNS entry' error
Occasionally you may receive error messages when connecting to audio/video
clips. A 'No DNS entry' error means that RealPlayer can't locate the server
that you're trying to connect to. In this case, check that the link address
is valid and ends with a .ram or .ra extension. Should you discover a broken
link please contact the webmaster.
See http://service.real.com/help/errors/index.html for other error messages you may get.