A screen capture program such as Microsoft Camcorder (which came with MSOffice 97 Pro), TechSmith Camtasia, or TechSmith SnagIt will work with different levels of quality and success. The programs will capture whatever's on the screen, including video sequences. TechSmith Camtasia uses it's own codec for the recording and playback of the action on the screen. The TechSmith Screen Capture Codec is slower but produces very high quality AVI's.

NOTES only: (it is assumed you can learn to use the screen capture programs to record the RealMedia clips to another file format)

Before recording the RealMedia clip so it can be converted to another format, you may want RealPlayer to stop using your graphics hardware to play its images. This will allow your screen capture program to capture what is shown.

Open RealPlayer, go to the "View" menu and select "Preferences...". Then click on the "Performance" tab. Under the heading "Video card compatibility", uncheck the box next to "Use optimized video display".

SnagIt and Camtasia can record audio while recording on-screen activity. SnagIt allowed me to record "what I heard" as the RealMedia clip played so I did not have to use a cable to connect the sound card's speaker output to the card's mic input. If this does not work for you, you will need to use a male to male audio cable or whatever means you have of routing the sound card's speaker output to its mic input. You will have to check the "Record Audio" option in SnagIt and Camtasia before you begin capturing with either of these programs. If ou do not have the correct audio cable, you may record the audio with a variety of sound editing programs such as CoolEdit, SoundForge, or GoldWave, and then add the sound into the final video. The "final video" refers to he result of converting to another format (MPEG), an AVI created by the video capture of the RealMedia clip using the screen capture program. For example, if you converted the AVI into an MPEG,you will need an MPEG editor to add the sound to the files, although synchronization will be difficult.

After recording the RealMedia files into other video files (avi), you can convert these files to MPEG or other formats with encoders available on the net.

By El



Problems

The quality sucks?
Crap in crap out! RM videos are often very very compressed and the image quality is not the best then and converting it to another format will make it even worse but it might be the only way if you want it to play on a standalone DVD Player or if you want it in DivX format.



Other RM Converting methods

How To convert your .rm files using EO Video

How To convert your .rm files using TINRA