This may be a hoax; I'm not sure. Last night someone sent me an e-mail from what the signature line claimed was a Hydrogen Audio account. The message sparked my curiosity because it mentioned comments I had made in this thread about the possibility of making a CLI for the RealAudio codecs packaged with shaohao's installer.

Briefly, the sender claimed to have written or found (not sure, since English was apparently not the sender's native language) such a program, which would function much like a command-line version of Streambox Ripper and enable faster-than-realtime decoding of RealMedia streams. The sender also said this program could be piped to other programs for encoding. (I'll note that if this is sinply a hoax the sender could have easily mimicked the description of such a program from reading the thread above. No link was offered, although the sender said the program could be e-mailed to me if I was interested.)

The intriguing thing is that the message reached me at all; only a handful of folks here have my e-mail address (I'm pretty sure this message was not from any of them), and my address has not been posted in the forum. The message was apparently not even sent through the HA system, since it replies to a Hotmail account ("HA_secareal054921")... which bounces. I also could not find any match to the signature ("sacareal") in the membership list. So how did the sender get my address?

I suspect e-mail trolling, but in the interest of fairness could "sacareal" respond... if this is genuine?

- M.

That command line program that decodes real media exists and is called Tinra (This Is Not Real Anymore)

http://www.geocities.com/tinra04/

Sorry... should have clarified in my first post:

I am aware of Tinra, and mentioned it in the thread linked above. Tinra converts RealMedia to AVI (a separate utility converts AVI to WAV), but is restricted to realtime conversion, and does not have stdout.

What sacareal e-mailed me about was - supposedly - a command-line program which would conver directly to WAV from RealMedia, or to whatever encoder was the next step via a pipe. The message also specified that this program was not restricted to realtime, and that it could perform as fast as Streambox Ripper.

- M.