I’m trying to watch a recorded event for a class. Unfortunately it is provided as a streaming .ram file, which means that RealPlayer is basically my only option for watching it. While I have a high-bandwidth internet connection, RealPlayer was still breaking up from time to time, so I decided that the best thing to do was to mute the sound, put it in the background, and let it buffer up the whole event.

Later I found that it had succeeded in buffering the whole event. As soon as I dragged the time slider back to the beginning of the event, RealPlayer forgot that it had anything buffered, and started fetching it again from scratch.

Of course, if I could simply download the file that would solve the problem, but they’ve deliberately designed RealPlayer to make that extremely difficult. It’s defective by design.