Grab Some Streams for Yourself!

good
key review info
application features
  • A cool user friendly GUI
  • (3 more, see all...)

What is it about?

Real7ime Converter is another program that wants to make your life easier by giving you the chance to record live RealPlayer streams.

If you find a great stream on the net and you want to cherish it forever, now there?s an easy way for you to do just that. With Real7ime Converter, you can convert any RealPlayer streaming medias to AVI format and more.

After installing the program, I went through the quick readme manual and began testing Real7ime Converter. At first, it all sounded easy enough? Copy and paste the shortcut into the URL bar in Real7time and select the way you want to convert the link.

Is it easy to use?

You get 4 main options: Image + Sound, Image, Sound Only (WAV), Sound Only (MP3). Wow, I thought to myself, this is gonna be a breeze!

I already had RealPlayer installed so it was a cinch to open it up, copy a radio stream and paste it into the converter. I selected the ?sound only? option and was on my way. Real7ime converter was successful both times after I gave it easy audio formats to copy. I tested both MP3 and WAV formats to make sure that both were audible and in good quality and both worked just fine.

I then went ahead to test the portion of the application to see if I can indeed record streaming videos. Initially, I started the test with the Image + Sound options, to see if I can get a live streaming video to record. I was unsuccessful. Instead, I kept on getting a ?Can?t find any decompressor for BGRA or ARGB format?.

Well, I went back to check if my settings were correct and tried again. Still, I received the same result. Well, I thought maybe I?m not doing something right. I went back to check the help files which weren?t that helpful since most of it was only FAQ.

I then thought I should try to use one of the following links that were included with the r7c_urls.txt. I went through nearly all of them trying to get Image + Sound to convert for the appropriate ones. But to my dismay, I kept on getting errors.

I went through about forty variations in the settings tab to try to find the right combination of settings. I was surely disappointed. I did not get my streaming video converted and I was let down.

If I was doing something wrong, I?d expect the help file to actually help me out, but that did not happen.

Overall, I?d have to say I had no problem at all when converting audio files, but being unsuccessful at converting streaming video files was a bit disappointing. I spent a good amount of time trying to get information about the error I received, but came up with dead ends.

I figured I must have been doing something wrong when trying to record streaming video. All the shortcuts that I copy and pasted were real videos that I was able to see on RealPlayer. They even had the same file extensions as those offered in the r7c_urls.txt.

So, after a couple of hours of testing and not getting the URL fetcher to work properly, I finally gave up and moved on.

The Good

I was easily able to convert streaming audio to WAV or MP3 format without hassles. But I can?t comment on how the converted videos look since it didn?t work for me.

The Bad

Video converting didn?t work for me. A better help file would be great.

The Truth

For this review, Real7ime Converter partially did what it said it could. I wasn?t too pleased with the aspect that I couldn?t get the Image + Audio conversion to go through. If I were doing something wrong, this should have been included in the readme.txt, but it lacked description. I hope they give this program a little more help because it has a lot of potential. I'd like to see the next version come out with a bigger bang.

Check out some pics below.

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user interface 2
features 3
ease of use 2
pricing / value 5


final rating 3
Editor's review
good
 
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