RutSum

Playing RM And RMVB Video Files On Linux

UPDATE : I have solved this problem, and the solution is here.

I have a large collection of short videos, which are from various sources - friends, YouTube, or BitTorrent. Most of these are in the RM (Real Media) format, which was originally meant for streaming online video or audio. But it is now a popular video/audio storage format too, mainly due the high compression ratio it offers. Real has another similar format, RMVB (Real Media Variable Bitrate), which offers higher compression due to a variable bitrate, and with less loss in quality.

Now on my PCLinuxOS system, RMVB files work perfectly fine. All I needed to do was install the win32-codecs package, and then install a suitable player for playing the files, such as KPlayer or MPlayer.

$ sudo apt-get install win32-codecs mplayer mplayer-gui

You can obviously use su if you don’t have sudo installed or your user isn’t in the sudoers list. win32-codecs is the name of the package in PCLinuxOS, it could be different in your favorite distro, but would be something that contains win32 or w32 in it’s name.

After this, open any RMVB file with MPlayer, and it works perfectly, with no problems at all.

The problem arises with the RM files. In MPlayer, if you open an RM Video file (not an RM audio file, RM format is used for both video and audio), it gives you an error. What is funny that you can hear the sound in the video, but not the video, and the best part is - the error says that MPlayer can’t access your audio device.

Screw MPlayer, let’s give the original creators a try - Let’s install Real Player, I thought. And I faced obvious disappointment. Though Real Player was somewhat better in handling the RM Video files - it displayed the video, but when I made it full screen, the video did not get expanded. Rather the current frame in the video became still, and it remained of the same size as the initial video. Moreover, the audio was jaggered and had random ‘hiccups’ in between.

I tried searching on random forums, tried contacting Real support, asked for help on the PCLinuxOS IRC channel, but couldn’t get a decent solution anywhere. The closest I got to solving the problem was a thread on Ubuntu Forums, which talks about playing RMVB files in Ubuntu, but this somewhat works for RM files too, but with a poor success rate.

This also reminds me of a problem of playing RM Audio files in Amarok, which was a major crunch for Sneezy Melon, a friend of mine, as he converted his complete music collection from mp3 to RM, lured by the high lossless compression, a decision which he now regrets.
Even after you install the required codecs, for some unknown reason, Amarok is unable to play and manage them. This is the error message that comes up -

Error Loading Media

There is no available decoder.

A problem occured while loading a library or decoder.

xine parameters: cook.so

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