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.