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.