I am looking for a way to download and convert realplayer files.
June 5, 2016 3:34 PM   Subscribe

I am a fan and subscriber of the site Reelradio.com. It's a site of old airchecks. Presently I must listen to the airchecks while on the internet which they link to realplayer. Is there a way to download these files directly onto my Mac computer? They probably do want their subscribers to do this so I'm throwing this out to the hive. When I click the links a .rm file opens and allows me to play it using realplayer
posted by citybuddha to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Being RealMedia files, which are a terrible, terrible format, and designed not to let you download the content (or at least not easily), you won't be able to get the file itself. You could use a program like Audacity, which is free, to record the audio in real time: press 'record' in Audacity, then play the file in Realplayer, and then save it in any format you like. That means you need to do it in real time though...
posted by prismatic7 at 4:52 PM on June 5, 2016


You can download these, but it's a real pain. I don't have an account, so I downloaded the tenth anniversary clip (which I assume is more or less the same as the other clips). The below process worked for me on a Windows machine. The directions below are written for a Mac computer:

You're going to need to do this mostly on the terminal. You're going to have to install a few pieces of software. Go ahead and open terminal. Go to Homebrew's website, and copy that command and paste it into the terminal and hit return. You'll probably have to type your password in a bunch of times during this process. After a while it should finish installing. Type this command to install RTMPdump; this is the tool to download these kinds of files: "brew install rtmpdump". Now install ffmpeg it will allow you to convert the files you download into mp3s: "brew install ffmpeg".

Ok, now that we've got the software we're going to need to open FireFox. If you don't have FireFox install it. If you already had FireFox running, close it and open it, and don't open any websites. Open one of the pages that has a clip that you want (I'll use the 10th anniverseray clip as an example). Right click on the page and click inspect element. In the window that opens at the bottom of FireFox right click and and click edit as html. Scroll down until you see something like this:
<div style="padding-left:25px; padding-top:12px; padding-right:25px;" padding-bottom:15px;="" id="mediaspace"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="player-licensed.swf" style="undefined" id="mpl" name="mpl" quality="high" allowfullscreen="false" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="transparent" flashvars="autostart=true&amp;volume=5&amp;screencolor=#FFFFFF&amp;frontcolor=#000000&amp;backcolor=#FDDF78&amp;lightcolor=#FFFFFF&amp;bufferlength=5&amp;file=reel/tenth.m4a&amp;streamer=rtmpe://moondog.reelradio.com/vod/" height="22" width="250"></div>
The bit that you care about is:
streamer=rtmpe://moondog.reelradio.com/vod/
Ok, you need to edit your hosts file. Follow those instructions to edit the host file. Add a line to your hosts file that takes the domain and subdomain from "rtmpe://moondog.reelradio.com/vod/":
127.0.0.1 moondog.reelradio.com
Save the hosts file, but don't close it, we'll use it again in a moment.

Open up terminal, and run "rtmpsrv". Go back to FireFox, and click refresh on that page we got the code from. Now look at terminal, if everything worked right, terminal should say something like:
rtmpdump -r "rtmpe://moondog.reelradio.com/vod/" -a "vod/" -f "WIN 21,0,0,242" -W "http://www.reelradio.com/tenth/player-licensed.swf" -p "http://www.reelradio.com/tenth/reeldemoplayer.php" -y "mp4:reel/tenth.m4a" -o tenth.flv

Closing connection... done!
Go back to the hosts file and remove the line that you added, and save the hosts file.

Go back to terminal, and copy the "rtmpdump ........ -o tenth.flv" command, and paste it into the terminal and hit return. That should download a copy of the media that you want. But it's probably in a format that's not convenient.

In terminal you can convert that file to a mp3 like this:
ffmpeg -i tenth.flv tenth.mp3
posted by gregr at 7:18 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Is there a way to download these files directly onto my Mac computer? They probably do want their subscribers to do this so I'm throwing this out to the hive.

No they do not:
REELRADIO Terms of Service specify that we provide STREAMING, not downloading, and attempting to copy REELRADIO files may result in your IP address being blocked. Specifically, our software may block addresses that make multiple connections ("download accelerators"). We may also block addresses that repeatedly transfer multiple exhibits in less time than it takes to listen to the exhibit(s). We welcome listeners, not downloaders.
posted by unliteral at 9:12 PM on June 5, 2016


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