
Devices on the same network talk to each other over Wi-Fi. The system stores multiple copies of the source file to account for device type, screen size, bandwidth, and device storage. RealPlayer Cloud accepts a variety of video formats and containers, including FLV (Flash), WMV (Windows Media), MKV (Matroska), DivX, Xvid, Mov, AVI, and MP4. All of them were available to watch quickly and played well on multiple devices.

To test it out, I uploaded several MP4 videos, as well as one that I shot on a Moto X smartphone using the RealPlayer Cloud Android app.

Real says it foresees, “introducing technological advances that will allow RealPlayer to recognize the origin of the video (a smartphone versus a Hollywood production) and adjust the sharing function accordingly” but that’s not the case right now. You can generally share videos that are as long as 15 minutes each-a restriction basically meant to prevent you from sharing TV show and movies-but there’s no time limit for videos shot on a mobile device.
