Real Player 16 convert.exe - Batch conversion

Real Player and it's media formats can be quite frustrating to work with as most conversion tools does not work, cannot be batched or cost money.

Believe it or not - Real Player (16 Basic) comes with a couple of tools to manage the format itself. Some more self-explanative than others.

Many of them are found in the same folder as RealPlayer itself;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Real\RealPlayer

convert.exe - CLI version of realconvert.exe, to convert files from and to Real Media.

realconverter.exe - To convert files from and to Real Media.
realtrimmer.exe - Some kind of editing tool.
realplay.exe - Player itself.
realcleaner.exe - Cleaning tool, nothing happends?

The CLI version of the converter - convert.exe (or converter.exe if you ask the program itself...) is quite hard to handle. It seems like it's quite outdated, left undeveloped. Yet it's what you want, a tool to batch convert Real Media into more usable formats.

I have explored some parts of it, here is an example:

Z:\test>rmconvert /i "C:\input.rm" /o "C:\output\" /of "output.mp4" /p "FORMAT-MP4.XML" /v

/i = input file
/o = directory to output to
/of = output file
/p = what conversion XML profile to use(!)
/v = be verbose


Note that the folder to output to and the filename to output to are separated.

An XML profile must be given, but none seems to exist. I found out that there is a link(!) between the graphical realconverter and this tool.

Open regedit.exe, and navigate here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\RealNetworks\RealConverter\16.0\Preferences\DeviceProfileSetting

Here are the names of the nonexistant xml files you need to get going, "FORMAT-MP4.XML", "FORMAT-RV.XML", "FORMAT-WMV.XML" and if you made one yourself in realconverter, "CUSTOM1". Somewhere down the line, Real may have converted its xml files into registry keys.

Most of the calls does not seem to produce any output - I guess it fails, but this did an .RV copy:

convert /i "input.rm" /o "C:\output\" /p "FORMAT-RV.XML" /v

Some files are really hard to convert, even with the graphical version.
It turned out for me that one rm file converted to rv by the graphical version had sound that did not sync.

But converting it to wmv worked, audio was in sync.

Some times the graphical converter cancels itself when the CPU is too stressed. It does not say anything but that it has been cancelled.

When converter has made a wmv file you need WMV9 codec for video and DivX codec for audio to work with the wmv file in VirtualDub.