My New Mac, Snow Leopard Edition, 2nd Edition

Downloading and Installing RealPlayer

To add sound and video to websites, a company called RealNetworks created its own audio and video file formats called RealAudio and RealVideo, respectively. Like nearly all audio and video files available over the Internet, both RealAudio and RealVideo file formats compress large files with little noticeable loss in audio or video quality. By compressing large audio and video files into smaller files, RealAudio and RealVideo allow web pages to download audio and video files quickly onto your computer. Since RealAudio and RealVideo were two of the first popular audio/video file formats available over the Internet, a handful of websites still offer only RealAudio and RealVideo files.

To play these files, you ...