Real One Player

[kdy]

I have a bunch of "Real One Player" movies that I would like to
write to DVD and watch on my television. Does anyone know
if this is possible? Done lots of research as a newbie but couldn't
find anyting on the subject.
Thank you!

[redwudz]

I haven't used my Mac for that conversion, but have you done a Mac forum search for 'Real Media' ? Should be some suggestions there.

[kdy]

Thanks for the reply!
Yes, before posting, I did a search and came up with several suggestions that possibly the newest version of ffmpegX might work. I did try my registered version and it doen't even recognize the format.
Searched forums all over the Internet still no luck, but lots of programs
if I was a windows user. Even checked "VersionTracker". Guess I'm
out of luck!
If any other Mac pros out there have a suggestion, would
greatly appreciate it!

[thoughton]

Mencoder can convert real media, quite hard to use though. There was a detailed MacOSXHints hint a while back written by BlueHz.

It also depends on what version of Real video your footage is. I think the BlueHz hint works for up to RV9, but I cant be positive.

[anaxamander]

I don't know if some $$$ program can export out of realmedia, but I know that mencoder is the only FREE way to convert realmedia. And you almost HAVE to convert out to an divx avi file (which is easier to convert out of to mpeg2).

I use mencoder all the time on the command line. Only a recent version of mencoder can be compiled with realmedia support (and even then it still needs seperate codecs installed) - so Mencoder for OS X.app is probably out.

You can either use ffmpegX (it installs a recent version - you need the realcodecs too), or you can compile your own using a porting system. I know for a fact that darwinports has a real variant to mencoder (part of the MPlayer package). In fact, I just compiled a new 1.0pre7 version the other day. Skipping over a bit of the details, you would "port pkg MPlayer +real +quicktime +vorbis +mad +mencoder +x264 -v" to create the binary with realmedia support built in.

Then you issue a command like this (its changed a little in the most recent pre7 version with the embedded fourcc in an avi file defaulting to "FMP4", which you need to change):

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:br=96 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=600 -ofps 29.97 /path/to/input/realmedia.rmvb -o /path/to/output.avi

-lameopts vbr=0:br=96 (this reduces the bitrate down - most rm files have poor audio anyway...)
-lavcopts vbitrate=700 (this reduces the bitrate of the video down from the default of 800)
-ofps 29.97 (some rm files are badly encoded, and mencoder thinks they may be 1000fps; this could be omitted)
-ffourcc xvid (this needs to be included with a pre7 mencoder - although you could set it to whatever logical code you want)

/paths - you can just use the Finder to drag and drop the input file onto the Terminal window to pick up the path
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You can also just install ffmpegX and use the mencoder binary it installs (I think its in /Library/Application\ Support/ffmpegx) and still use the command line. Just be sure to install those codecs (the darwinports port will fetch them with that single command).

When you start your conversion, you can let it convert for say 20 seconds and then press "Control - c" and the conversion will cease. You can then double click on it to open in QT Player to get a quick idea of success (the index will be broken so don't expect to ff/rw in that file)

Once you do that, you can edit out the crap you don't like with the "-ss 10:00 -endpos 20:00" addition to you command and your clip will start at 10 minutes & last for 20 minutes. It's not that hard once you get used to it. But the mencoder/mplayer manpage is off-the-charts unwieldy.