hidden info in .rm format, what do you know?

[surf-monkee]

OK so from reading here I know a lot of you hate real player, fair enough.

I have used the 'real player alternative' I found here for while, but it too stopped playing the .rm movies I was downloading so I put real player back on. ( it said certain 'pins' were missing)

Last night I downloaded a few movies via 'megaupload' and half way through 'part three' to my horror it appeared that real player was forced to connect to the internet while a particular movie was playing. ( I was not connected)

It is possible real player was trying to update but somehow I am not so sure.....



question is it possible to embed information in to a 'rm' format movie to make your player 'do things' you probably wouldnt want it to do.....(like make the modem connect)

also these same movies wont FF thro, if I try to FF thro the movie real player locks up, as did the previous real player subsititute player. These .rm movies also come with full 'tags' like an mp3 player, and when playing in real player also display various http links (in chinese and gobble de gook text) in the play bar where it tells you the titles and stuff........

I have subsequently used SUPER to convert these movies to different formats and they FF perfectly everytime (wmv and vcd compliant) (pmsl , I'd like to see my dvd player connect to the internet while playing a VCD!)

whats going on here?... if you have any knowledge of this and have the time to type some stuff, my curiosity would be most satisfied!

thanks for a great web site, I learned so much from here already!

[celtic_druid]

Could be that real player doesn't ship with some older codecs that these files use and therefor has to connect and download them to play. If I recall Gabest's real media video decoder wrapper doesn't support RV10/RV20, you need to use ffdshow.

Super would use mencoder to convert which also contains RV10/RV20 decoders since they are part of libavcodec, so it would be able to convert.

[Ai Haibara]

I think .rm movies do have the ability to force the browser to open to a certain webpage, yes (either as an advertisement or precursor to DRM, who knows). Also, if I remember correctly, there's an option in RealPlayer to disable it (though I don't have a version of RP in front of me to check, and it's been some time since I last looked, so it may not be in newer versions.)

In other words, I may well be wrong.