Encoding Real Media on an Intel Mac with Squeeze 4.5

Posted by Dave on February 13th, 2007

At the moment, there aren’t any [tag]Intel[/tag]-native [tag]Real[/tag] [tag]Media[/tag] encoders for Mac. This means that Universal Binary applications running on an Intel Mac can’t [tag]encode[/tag] to .[tag]rm[/tag] files. The main “batch encode” application for Mac – [tag]Sorenson[/tag] [tag]Squeeze[/tag] Compression Suite 4.5 – has this problem. But as ever, there is a solution.

If you’re using Squeeze 4.5 – which is now a Universal Binary – you’ll find that when it launches on an Intel Mac, it doesn’t list “Real Media (.rm)” in its “Format & Compression Settings” pane. (You can see this in the 30-day trial version, too.)

What you’ll need to do is to force Squeeze to start up under Rosetta – Apple’s technology for running PowerPC applications on Intel Macs. This will force Squeeze to use its PowerPC binary, not its Intel binary.

To do this, find the Squeeze application – “Squeeze.app” – on your hard disk, in your Applications folder. Select the application in the finder, and press Apple-i to open a Get Info window for the application. Check the “Open using Rosetta” box (just underneath the Color labels in the Get Info window), and close the Get Info window.

Launch Squeeze again, and it will launch using the PowerPC binary version of the application. You should find that you now have a set of Real Media presets in the “Format & Compression Settings” pane. These can be used to encode Real Media files. It won’t be as fast as encoding to other video formats when running the Intel-native Squeeze binary, but it will work!

If you subsequently want to encode to other formats at full encoding speed, then you can simply undo the above process to switch back to using the Intel binary. Open the Get Info window, uncheck the Open using Rosetta box, and close the Get Info window. Squeeze will now launch its Intel-native version, enabling you to encode the Intel-savvy formats at native speeds.

Update 2 April 2008: Symbiosis have released Squeeze 5 for Mac and PC. However, it still doesn’t support Real Media encoding for Intel Macs. Hopefully the workaround described above will still work.



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Reader Comments

Comment:
1
Written by:
Daniel
Posted on:
May 21st, 2007 at 2:59 pm

Hey Dave, I tried this little trick, and everytime i try to export something it says “squeeze was unable to create the output file. Please check that you can conect and have write privileges to the output directory.” However this doesn’t occur when I try to do any other types of compressions, ie flash, quicktime etc… any idea how to solve this?

Comment:
2
Written by:
Meghan
Posted on:
June 27th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

Hey Dave,

Thanks so much for this article. I recently convinced my boss to purchase a brand new G5 for me at work. With some much work I was able to convince him that this would meet our needs. I had no idea that I would be unable to find anything that would allow me to create .rm on the mac though and we stream everything to .rms. The pressure was on and the only solutions I had found was to invest in a new quicktime server. Your solution saved me!!! We downloaded the free trial of squeeze and launched it just as you instructed and it works great. I even had someone from Sorenson contact me and tell me that “they did not have any products at this time” that could meet my needs.

Maybe they need you to go and give them a lesson on their product.

Thanks again
Meghan

Comment:
3
Written by:
Jason
Posted on:
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:57 pm

Daniel, I think you might be experiencing the same problem as me. When Quicktime updated to 7.2 it broke the Real encoding engine somehow. There is an update on Sorenson’s page for 4.5, but I have version 4.3 and there is currently no update yet. They suggest you pay them to upgrade to 4.5 and install the patch or downgrade your QuickTime to 7.1 or earlier.

Comment:
4
Written by:
Julian
Posted on:
October 31st, 2007 at 10:45 pm

Daniel,
Answering pretty late here, but the problem you describe also happens when you’re saving to a folder that has a space in its name. For some reason, this makes Real choke. So every directory name, even your hard drive, that makes up the path where your video file is living cannot have any spaces. Hope this helps.
Julian

Comment:
5
Written by:
David
Posted on:
May 5th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

Squeeze 5 doesn’t have the Open using Rosetta option. Any suggestions?