[MPlayer-users] Capturing streaming RealVideo.

[The Wanderer]

Jesse W. Asher wrote:

> 
> I've been reading the docs, googling, and reading on the net to try
> to figure this out, but haven't had much luck.
> 
> I'm trying to use mencoder to capture streaming RealVideo.  I've used
> the following command with very poor results:
> 
> mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy rtsp://foo.com/stuff.rm -o output.rm
> 
> I do get an output.rm file, but the video is horrible (it's really
> blocky) and there isn't any audio.

This would probably be because you're going about it wrong. To capture
streamed video (and/or audio) into a file, you want to use MPlayer, not
MEncoder. The command line is

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile outfile.rm rtsp://foo.com/stuff.rm

which will not always work, but should; if it doesn't, it's almost
certainly either clever "we don't want you to get this except how we say
you can" by the people hosting the stream (in which case you shouldn't
be able to play it, either) or a bug in MPlayer.

> Any idea as to what I'm doing wrong here?  The real goal is to be
> able to capture this flow and convert it into MPEG video on the fly.
> But I couldn't get that to work either (even after reading the docs).

Well, you won't be able to convert on the fly with the above method, but
you should be able to convert the resulting RM file afterwards with
MEncoder; I haven't done much (anything, really) with MPEG video as
such, so I can't really help you with that beyond some very generic
encoding suggestions which you could just as easily get from reading the
man page.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.