[MPlayer-users] Ports used for streaming

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2004 at 08:57:26PM +0100, James Le Cuirot wrote:
> 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.

This documentation is for Real's stupid software, not for MPlayer.
MPlayer will (like any properly written application) use whatever
ports the OS assigns it, rather than trying to hack in its own
port-assignment. You need to learn how to administer a server rather
than just setting up an idiotic firewall, which [repeat after me] DOES
NOTHING!

Yep, you heard right. If you're blocking ports that are open, then
they're not accessible, so why the fsck are they open in the first
place?????????? And if you're blocking ports that are not open, well,
they don't need to be blocked because they won't accept connections
anyway.

This question belongs on network-newbies-list, not mplayer-users.

Rich