Let me actually try to answer your question. I don't use RM very often, but I just tried a test case. Using V5, I rendered to RM 9 and played back on my old Real Player (version 2.0). The name and artists information I entered in the Vegas RM dialog showed up, but the copyright and comments did not.

I repeated the test in Vegas 6.0b and got the same results. I have no explanation or workaround.

I only use it for quick sound bytes or sample audio. Quality is not really an issue. For streaming media, I find it adequate for my needs.

All I can get when I render to something simple such as audio-only 56K audience is just the file name. However, I am using a .ram file to make it "stream" on a non-RM server (a simple web site).

Locking would be nice to discourage downloading, but as was pointed out, this can be circumvented. I don't think many normal web surfers would bother to search for and pay for programs to circumvent this.

PS Thanks john for the reply. I have used RealMedia for a long time, before all these others came out and I deplore the Windows media player crap. It is also pretty common on the web, desptite it's supposed "hatred" ;-)

I'm just curious.

Also, if RM is so bad for streaming A/V, what is better? Please don't say WNV (Micro$oft!)

I share your sentiments regarding Microsoft in general, but you might want to take another look at WMV and WMA, the video and audio streaming formats. One of the advantages of Microsoft's being the big gorilla with billions of dollars in the bank is that they can generously fund some very deep research projects. Over the past 5 years or so Microsoft has developed excellent, close to state-of-the-art, video and audio codecs. On top of that, you can download and use for free a quite sophisticated Microsoft encoder program. I personally don't use the MS Media player at all; I use a freeware one called Zoom Player that has about 10x the features of the MS Player. But the MS codecs are an entirely different matter, and they really are very good.

On the website I maintain for the choir I shoot, I have demonstration video clips of previous performances. These are encoded at 320x240 pixels, 200Kb/sec and the quality is surprisingly good.

Flash is also a very nice way to show video. No separate player to load, and the appearance can be customized.

See the thread here on Flash 8, it is likely to become a big hit. The new VP6 codec even seems to blow both WMV and H.264 out of the water.

If anyone can point me to a better audio codec than WMA that supports chapters I'm all ears. If only they were easier to get to in WMP or is there an alternative WMA player that makes it easier to navigate using chapters?
Bob.