Ah, Real Audio/Video — that painfully difficult media format that rears it’s ugly head every once in a while. Did you know that instead of using Real Player on your Mac, you can convert Real Media (.rm) files to other formats, such as MPEG, MOV, MP3, and AVI? By following a simple set of instructions from Mac OS X Hints, you can convert Real audio and video into MP3 and AVI files, and many other formats.
- Download and install ffmpegx.
- Download and install a handful of programs/codecs: mencoder, mplayer, mpeg2enc, and reallib.
- Drag and drop your real media files into ffmpegx, select the output format you wish to use, and let ffmpegx do it’s work.
RM video files are a straightforward conversion with ffmpegx, however RM audio files may freeze up the converter. To avoid this, Mac OS X Hints suggests you add the .wav extension to the end of the file name before converting.
