Ripping And Encoding Streaming RM, or How I Defeated RealPlayer
May 13th, 2008I’ve known (and written about) MIT’s OpenCourseWare project for a while but never gone through any of the courses. I’ve found the first one I want to work through on Data Wrangling’s outstanding Hidden Video Courses in Math, Science, and Engineering page. One of the courses in the Mathematics header is Godel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey, and I decided to bite.
The book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is widely praised as being an important, mind-bending, eye-opening book, but the reviews I’ve seen generally fall have fallen into two categories:
- people who have tried to read it but quit about 1/3 of the way through, but still proudly display it on their shelves as a badge of honor
- b) people who have read it and understand it, but don’t feel like trying to explain it to the uninitiated.
Since the MIT OCW course was a summer lecture series for high school students, I figured I could keep up. And by watching the lectures first, I’m hoping the book will be easier when I get around to reading it. It doesn’t seem like a book where I should worry about spoiling the ending.
There was one problem that took me a while to overcome: the lectures were in streaming .rm (Real Media) format. That means RealPlayer. I am not friends with RealPlayer - I cut my ties with Real in 2002 and vowed never to have their software on any of my computers again. If you don’t understand my revulsion, just Google “real player sucks” (477,000 hits).
So after a few days of tinkering, I came up with this solution for ripping rm streams and encoding them in a different format (I chose .mp4 so I can watch them on computer or video iPod). It takes about 20-25 mintues per hour of media but can be setup up in batches to run overnight. In my opinion, that’s a small price to avoid dealing with RealPlayer.
[NOTE: This is for Windows XP. YMMV on other platforms]











