[MPlayer-users] Ports used for streaming

[James Le Cuirot]

Hello. I've set up Helix Universal Server on a Gentoo Linux server. It's behind
a firewall, which isn't ideal but I've managed to get it going okay except for
one thing that's puzzling me. When trying to play anything (except RealMedia
which doesn't even work locally) to MPlayer, it just won't work unless I have
UDP destination ports 32001-33000 open for output on the server. I find this
strange because Real states in its documentation that ports 6970-32000 should be
opened and I can find no reference anywhere of formats such as Quicktime
requiring ports higher than this. All the formats play fine in their respective
players. Why is MPlayer using different ports? The other strange thing is that
for the port range 6970-32000, I can tell the firewall to only accept
connections that are in the ESTABLISHED and RELATED state (see iptables docs)
and it works but if I do the same for 32001-33000, it doesn't work. Seemingly a
new connection is being made in this latter range.

James