calum.org:~#

Recording Real Audio streams in Linux

Ever wished you could get a Radio 4 comedy program in OGG or MP3 format, but all they have is streamable Real Audio? Follow these simple instructions, and your wish will be granted. Dump the stream to a file. (Note - you won't see any output while it is doing this, so you'll need to check the size of the output file to make sure it's working. It will exit when it has finished though.) 
mplayer -v -cache 128 -rtsp-stream-over-tcp -dumpstream -dumpfile dump.ra rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/comedy/wed1830.ra
Convert it to WAV/PCM format. 
mplayer -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=dump.pcm dump.ra
And finally, encode it to OGG and delete the pcm file.. 
oggenc --managed -m 96 -M 225 -q 3.0 dump.pcm && rm dump.ra
For some reasons the ogg is twice the size of the dump of the stream. But frankly, I can't be bothered to work out why. Bandwidth and diskspace are cheap.

Posted by Calum on 2005-06-26T00:00

Comments

Thanks, found that very useful but as a very Linux newbie, if i wanted to encode to mp3 instead of ogg, what app could I use to do that and what would the command line be (see, I said I was a newbie :-) Thanks Joe
Look up "lame". Something like: lame dump.pcm && rm dump.ra

Add a comment