.rm to uncompressed avi on OSX?

[midnightraver42]

Hello, I have a couple questions about converting rm files on a mac and avi's...

the rm files I have are compressed files, 120 MB for about an hour. how do I convert them to uncompressed avi's?? am trying to keep the audio and video quality the same as in the RM files, i.e. as lossless as possible...

is xVid an uncompressed codec? I have converted a few .rm files to xVid .avi's using ffmpegx's mencoder with decent success. but I dont think these are "uncompressed avi's" are they? the size(188MB) is very small for the length of the video(60 Min)...

any help is appreciated...

Thanks

[Baldrick]

Moving you to our mac forum section.

[redwudz]

You don't really want to convert them to uncompressed AVI. They would be huge, on the order of 40GB an hour or more. And the quality won't improve. At best it will be the same.

Real Video, Xvid/Divx, H.264, MOV, WMV, and several others are highly compressed formats. DV AVI would be a fairly low compression format, about 13GB per hour, and a good choice for editing in a AVI type format. Or less compressed, HuffyUV or Lagarith would be a couple of choices. Lower compression means larger file size.

But for RM, unless it is very high quality, I would just use Xvid or similar. If you need to edit the file after conversion, that's where you might use a less compressed codec for conversion. Xvid is not good for editing.

If you are using the Xvid codec, you should be able to set the codec to a Quantizer setting of 2 or lower and get very close to the original RM quality. But the file size with be larger.

What do your want to do with the files after conversion?

And welcome to our forums.

[midnightraver42]

You don't really want to convert them to uncompressed AVI. They would be huge, on the order of 40GB an hour or more. And the quality won't improve. At best it will be the same.

Real Video, Xvid/Divx, H.264, MOV, WMV, and several others are highly compressed formats. DV AVI would be a fairly low compression format, about 13GB per hour, and a good choice for editing in a AVI type format. Or less compressed, HuffyUV or Lagarith would be a couple of choices. Lower compression means larger file size.

But for RM, unless it is very high quality, I would just use Xvid or similar. If you need to edit the file after conversion, that's where you might use a less compressed codec for conversion. Xvid is not good for editing.

If you are using the Xvid codec, you should be able to set the codec to a Quantizer setting of 2 or lower and get very close to the original RM quality. But the file size with be larger.

What do your want to do with the files after conversion?

And welcome to our forums.

thanks for the response...

What I have on the rm files is live music performances with audio and video, I am open to using any format that will retain as much of the original video/audio as possible, this isnt something I want to have a poor quality copy of...and space isnt really an issue... My end result is to burn it to DVD

about the quantizer setting, right now it is set as
QMin=2 QMax=15
should I change that?

thanks!

[tomlee59]

If your end goal is a DVD, then why go to the trouble of encoding into an intermediate format?? Every conversion takes time, and degrades quality, so if you don't need the intermediate form, there's no good reason for making extra work for yourself.

To end up with the highest quality, use the highest bit rate consistent with fitting the movie on whatever size DVD you are going to produce. The DVD spec also has a bitrate ceiling of just south of 10Mb/s (9.8Mb/s if you want to be picky). So you can't go higher than that.

[redwudz]

I agree if your final format is to be DVD, I would skip Xvid entirely. If you really need a in-between format, you might try DV AVI, or for less compression HuffyUV or Lagarith.

I haven't used my Mac for video in quite a while, so more experienced Mac users may give you better advice. You will likely need to resize the video for DV as it's the same framesize as DVD video. But you will need to resize anyway for DVD.

But better, as mentioned, would be a single conversion to MPEG-2, then author to DVD.

And for the Quantizer setting, this is the one I mean:

[midnightraver42]

If your end goal is a DVD, then why go to the trouble of encoding into an intermediate format?? Every conversion takes time, and degrades quality, so if you don't need the intermediate form, there's no good reason for making extra work for yourself.

To end up with the highest quality, use the highest bit rate consistent with fitting the movie on whatever size DVD you are going to produce. The DVD spec also has a bitrate ceiling of just south of 10Mb/s (9.8Mb/s if you want to be picky). So you can't go higher than that.

ok, Im open to doing it differently...

Anyone know or a RM>MPEG-2 converter for Macintosh?

[midnightraver42]

I agree if your final format is to be DVD, I would skip Xvid entirely. If you really need a in-between format, you might try DV AVI, or for less compression HuffyUV or Lagarith.

Are these for Macintosh? all the comments seem to be PC based..

I haven't used my Mac for video in quite a while, so more experienced Mac users may give you better advice. You will likely need to resize the video for DV as it's the same framesize as DVD video. But you will need to resize anyway for DVD.


But better, as mentioned, would be a single conversion to MPEG-2, then author to DVD.

gladly, any suggestions on RM>MPEG-2 on Mac?

And for the Quantizer setting, this is the one I mean:

mine looks like this as Im using ffmpegx

[terryj]

try using the DVDmpeg2enc option in ffmpegx?
good luck.
.rm is such a fussy format to convert from,
I see why you were thinking of going intermediate,
then to DVD.

the only solution I know that's straight forward without headaches,
is this PC based version.

[midnightraver42]

try using the DVDmpeg2enc option in ffmpegx?
good luck.

Pretty sure I have to use the mencoder engine with .rm files but I tried anyways, and heres the result after it failed.

* /bin/sh: line 1: /Library/Application Support/ffmpegX/mpeg2enc: Malformed Mach-o file
Thu Nov 8 20:21:56 EST 2007
INFO: [yuvscaler] yuvscaler 1.9.0 (15-02-2004) is a general scaling utility for yuv frames
INFO: [yuvscaler] (C) 2001-2004 Xavier Biquard <xbiquard@free.fr>, yuvscaler -h for help, or man yuvscaler
movtoy4m
Copyright 2002-2006 Johan Lindstr??m
All rights reserved..
ERROR: Could not open movie: /Users/****/Desktop/Dez/Dez.rm
**ERROR: [yuvscaler] Could'nt read YUV4MPEG header!

.rm is such a fussy format to convert from,
I see why you were thinking of going intermediate,
then to DVD.

the only solution I know that's straight forward without headaches,
is this PC based version.

yep, fussy indeed...

thanks... no pc though

[dnix71]

I have a RM video of Enya that I converted as a test of ffmpegX on Real video. It worked fine.
The avi is three times the original rm size, but the quality is the same.

[dnix71]

The avi was then handed to Toast. The dvd video ts is now 58mb.

[terryj]

yeah dnix71, that what was I was suggesting, that a hand-off
to a intermediate format would be necessary to eventually
get it into a DVD.

But the OP wanted a simple 1 to 1 solution.
And if ffmpegx failed to give him that straight
1 to 1 path ( 2 step process) ( .rm to authored valid Video_TS folder
for DVD), then it would have to be done on a PC,
as that's the only thing I found.

nothing exists on the mac that is 1 to 1,
at best, like you pointed out,
it's 1 to 1 to 1 ( 3 step process).

[dnix71]

A movie capture utility like iShowU or SnapZ Pro X will make an avi in one step, but the files are hideously large. At 15 fps into a mov, it's like 100Mb a minute. Which is strange, because that mov handed to iSquint will return the file back to original size if you choose 'optimize for iPod' and 'go nuts' for quality.

I don't like proprietary formats like Real, but I do admire their evil genius at making such a small file that looks as good as it does.

[terryj]

A movie capture utility like iShowU or SnapZ Pro X will make an avi in one step, but the files are hideously large. At 15 fps into a mov, it's like 100Mb a minute. Which is strange, because that mov handed to iSquint will return the file back to original size if you choose 'optimize for iPod' and 'go nuts' for quality.

I don't like proprietary formats like Real, but I do admire their evil genius at making such a small file that looks as good as it does.

Yeah "hijacking" is the way to go with .rm files,if you got the free space on your HD.

I agree with you on not liking their proprietary file format....had they really wanted to, they could have
come to an agreement with Apple, and work together on their container formats.
Their new rmvb ( realmedia variable bitrate) files are really good, the ones I've seen on the web.

[midnightraver42]

thanks for the suggestions guys, Ill try to hijack it, and see how it goes...