Converting rm to mp3
Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.
For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:
mencoder input_file.rm -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -of rawaudio -lameopts cbr:br=128 -o output_file.mp3
This failed for me with an error that video was not optional. Rather than trying to figure out how to make mencoder deal with an audio only rm… I looked for another way around it.
So, …if you want another way to approach it, try this…
This makes use of mplayer to dump the audio to wav and then lame to encode to mp3
mplayer -ao pcm:file=audiodump.wav myrealmediafile.rm
lame -h -v -b 128 audiodump.wav finalemp3file.mp3
The -b rate in the lame command sets the minimum bitrate – if you’re converting audio and you know your device can deal with variable bit rates you could drop that to 32. (That’s what I did…)