Creating a RealVideo Events File

Creating a synchronized multimedia event using .rm files uses the rmmerge tool. This is a three-step process:

  1. Use a text editor to create an input file specifying the display time for each URL, title, author or copyright event.
  2. Use the rmmerge tool to generate a binary file from the text input file by typing the following command:
    rmmerge -f rmevents.dll event.txt output.rm
    where:
    event is the text file created in step 1
    output is the .rm file that contains these events
  3. Merge your new events .rm file with an audio or video file using the following command:
    rmmerge <event file> <audio or video file> <output file>
    where:
    <event file> is the .rm file created in the previous step
    <audio or video file> is the file merged with the event file
    <output file> is the file resulting from the merge

    For example:
    rmmerge event.rm audio_video.rm output.rm

Creating the Input File

Begin by creating a list of the URLs, titles, authors, or copyrights that you want to be shown during your presentation and the times within RealAudio or RealVideo clip when they should be displayed. The syntax for each entry should follow the format (with a space between each part of the command):

u starttime endtime EventURL
i starttime endtime Title
a starttime endtime Author
c starttime endtime Copyright

where:

u stands for URL event; each line starts with the letter u
i
stands for title; each line starts with the letter i
a
stands for author; each line starts with the letter a
c
stands for copyright; each line starts with the letter c
starttime
is the time into the clip when the new event is shown
endtime is the time into the clip when that event ends
EventURL (generally beginning with "http:" or "file:") is the Internet address for that event (usually an HTML document)

The time for starttime and endtime is:
[[[days:]hours:]minutes:]seconds[.tenths]

The lines of the input file must be in ascending order of start time. The end time should be at least one tenth of a second before the start time of the next event. The following example shows how an input file might look:

u 00:00:10.0 00:00:59.9 http://www.real.com/
u 00:01:00.0 00:02:00.0 http://www.mysite.com/page2/

This input file tells RealPlayer to send the Web browser to the RealNetworks home page ten seconds into the audio clip. One minute into the audio clip, the Web browser displays a page from "www.mysite.com."

The input file may also contain comment lines beginning with the # symbol. These comment lines are ignored by the event creation tool and are a good way to document the date that the file was created and the type of information found on each page.

© 1997 RealNetworks, Inc.