UCLA streams – Real Media (.rm)
So apparently mencoder only seems to work for asf,wmv,avi,mpeg streams, and does not like real media streams (I think this is purely due to the fact I do not have real media codecs on this machine and therefore -ovc/-oac options would not work anyway). So I’ve defaulted back to using mplayer for ripping the real media streams. Fortunately, I had remembered seeing this, which pretty much explains what one needs to do.
For UCLA, the linked .rm file is actually just plain text that gives you the actual url. However, in the case of UCLA (like stanford), one can simply replace “http” with “rtsp”.
mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://url.rm
The most interesting piece of information is that on windows, it is possible for mplayer to rip streams even if it can’t actually play it. For example, my Windows machine (what I’m using atm) does not have real player or alternative/hacked rm codecs on it, and therefore I can’t actually play .rm. However, I was able to rip it and someone else was able to play it. This does make sense.