Today someone requested RealAudio support on the empeg, to which I said "phooey!" I hate Real's player and their incompatible formats. Quicktime has an even worse player, and similarly incompatible formats (with apologies to any Mac users.)

This got me to thinking about solutions for those who have files encoded in Real or Quicktime and would like to convert them. At one time I looked into this and there was nothing available that supported the more recent versions of these codecs... However, recently, I've found a couple neat little utils that have worked well for all the files I've tried them on.

For conversion from Quickime to AVI, the best thing I've found is RadTools Bink Video. Using this, I have had good success convertiing Quicktime MOV's to DivX AVI's. Quality has been pretty decent, speed wasn't too bad either. You actually need Quicktime installed for it to work, because it apparently uses Quicktime API's to help out with its conversion. Very handy.

To convert RealVideo files, I've found TINRA, which stands for "This Is Not Real Anymore." The conversion speed is a little on the slow side, but the results have been good. I don't have any RealAudio files to test it with but I'd guess it also supports those in addition to RealVideo.

Anyway, I figured I'd share these links in case someone else has a bunch of content in one of these crappy formats and can't stand running Quicktime player or RealOne player to view them. There's still no really portable video format (save MPEG which is way too big) so it's good to have these tools in the toolbox.

Yeah, actually. I recommend "EOVideo" (Link unhandy at the moment, will dig it out when i get home..)

It will let you convert from QuickTime to any other Codec you have installed, and does have an MPEG encoder (trail-based) You do have to have Quicktime installed, because it uses the APIs as well..

Me.

save MPEG which is way too big

Except MPEG 4. The good news is that many companies are going towards MPEG 4 as a standard, including Quicktime. Quicktime 6 is actually just MPEG 4, as is Divx and Xvid and such.

Of course MS is going the opposite direction.

And the .avi file format has always been a mess, but at least it has always been consistant under Windows by having codecs available to install to allow anything to play the format.

Thanks for the links, Tony. I've been looking for conversion tools lately and found a couple, but they were very limited.

Specifically, Apple's "MPEG-4 Video" codec for QT6 is just MPEG-4.. QT6 itself still supports all the other stuff it used to. The standard MP4 container for MPEG-4 media is essentially a subset of the QuickTime MooV container.

If you install 3ivx it includes a MOV parser (and AAC decoder, too) that works to let you play .movs in any DirectShow app without QuickTime, if you have appropriate codecs for the video of course. 3ivx plays almost anything vaguely related to MPEG-4 except MS-[airquote]MPEG4[/airquote] v1 and v2. Plus it's the fastest decoder available (at least for OS X, not entirely sure that applies to Windows) and has the best postfiltering capabilities.

Quicktime is getting as bad as realone. Does anyone know how to get it to stop playing mp3's in my webbrowser when I click a link for one ? I have .mp3 associated with freeamp but it keeps playing in quicktime anyway.

I got it. I had to uncheck audio under mime types preferences in quicktime. That's really retarded because they don't list mp3 as a file type under that option and they have a seperate section for mp3 which I already had unchecked.

One is for files opened from your drive (with a name and no MIME type), the other for media loaded from the web (with a MIME type and often no name).