Capturing Realmedia RM Streams to a file on Disk

There is a lot of software out there that can capture realmedia online streams for a fee. I've found a way in linux to do the same without buying third party software.

The main motivation for this is I discovered SBS (an Australian broadcaster) provides audio news programs (1 hour length) in a variety of different languages. And if you didn't know studying languages is yet another hobby of mine.

The problem is their streams are realmedia and meant to be listened to online. I'd rather listen to them using my portable mp3 player. I've talked about converting rm to mp3 in a previous post... now let's look at capturing the rm stream.

Here's all it takes to capture that realmedia file....

mplayer -dumpstream -playlist http://addressto/ramgen/record/$1.rm -dumpfile $1.rm

In this case we use mplayer to dump the stream, we give it the address that the playlist is generated from. Since I'm studying more than one language I pass the language to the script I've got this in as a variable so... getstream spanish would make $1 = spanish and the file get's dumped to spanish.rm