* Newsflash - 1 May *
Media Problems on GeoCities
Some of you may already be aware of the problems that have cropped up within the last week at GeoCities.
Visitors to sites at GeoCities have encountered errors with several media file types, including MIDI (*.mid), MP3 and RealMedia.
I suspect that this is not a temporary error but a drastic measure on the part of Y!GeoCities to deal with possible copyright issues.
A temporary fix for this problem would be to transfer your media files to another server.
With RealAudio, you could link directly to the media file (*.ra or *.rm), bypassing the use of metafiles (*.ram or *.rpm). You can still link to files on other servers through metafiles on GeoCities servers.
We’ll keep you posted on new developments here at Vienna Online. Stay tuned.
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It’s been a long break of some six months since I last wrote in this column. Back in November, I was glad to announce here that GeoCities was making their GeoMedia program free. Quite soon after that, GeoMedia became GeoCities Streaming Media, and RealServer was no longer supported.
If you’ve read the October issue of Bytes, you’ll know the differences between RealServer and an ordinary web server. Right now, GeoCities Streaming Media is nothing more than your ordinary GeoCities account, a typical web server account.
Drop by the GeoCities Streaming Media page and you’ll see that it does little more than tell you to use RealProducer to publish RealAudio and RealVideo to your website. That would merely be using the built-in wizards in RealProducer to create and upload the necessary content to your GeoCities account.
So we’re back to square one - no different from what things were like even before GeoMedia was introduced.
This turn of events caused me to pull the plug on the article that I’d written for January - I’ve been real busy ever since and was unable to find the time or energy to write anything, until now, that is.
Well, now that I’ve given an update on the streaming media situation here at GeoCities, perhaps we’d be able to go on to the other exciting articles that I’d planned to write. Now if I could just find the time...
Keith K. Klassiks has been real busy in his second year of Junior College life. He has managed to take a little breather to write this article, and hopes to be able to find more spare time to write. He hasn’t had a chance to work on his
website recently, but he did help to create
one for the writers’ society at his college, of which he is a member.
