David J Rice

Okay, so I recently wanted to convert a Real Media file to play in Quicktime. Here’s how I went about it.

Archiving

So after a little digging about I found a nice little tool called CocoaJT to capture a real player stream, and save it as a regular real media (.rm) file. Nice!

Converting

Okay now the tricky part, I found a couple of instructions on macosxhints on how to use ffmpegX to do the job.

• Download and install ffmpegx
• Download Real Player 10 (direct-ish link)
• Create a new folder on your desktop named reallib
• Go to your Applications folder, control-click on Real Player and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu
• Navigate into Contents -> Frameworks -> HXClientKit.framework -> Helix Plugins -> Codecs. Inside the Codecs folder should be 12 items. Copy all of them into the reallib folder you created on the desktop.
• Move the reallib folder into the /Library/Application Support/ffmpegX folder

At this point we are ready to try converting a real media file

• Ensure your video file has an rm extension, i.e. file.rm
• Open ffmpegx
• Drop file.rm into the slot next to Open (the source file)
• Click on the Video tab and choose MPEG4 [.AVI] mencoder as the video codec
• Click encode (this should take a couple of minutes)

After following this I ended up with a .avi file that would not play in Quicktime, so I performed another conversion on the output of our encoded avi file.

• Set output.avi as the source file
• Click on the Video tab and choose MPEG4 [.MOV](ffmpeg) as the video codec
• Click on the Audio tab and choose AAC (MOV/MP4/3GP) as the audio codec

At this stage we now have a movie that will play in Quicktime, however the audio is out of sync with the video. This is a problem already reported about the macosxhints tip.

Synching

I found another nice little tool called QT Synch, that made it a snap to fix synchronisation of the audio and video.

Exporting

I thought I was done here, however if you are wanting to use the video with the likes of you tube, it is advisable to export it as a mpeg4 within quicktime, as youtube doesn’t understand the synchronisation commands.

Tada, it’s a bit of a long process but we have one Quicktime movie! I didn’t think it were possible, but I hate real player so much more than I already did.