RM Video Format

What is RM video format? RealMedia, RM video format, is a multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is .rm. It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet. Typically these streams are in CBR (constant bitrate). Support of RealMedia is available in a wide variety of multimedia players for different architectures/platforms, including RealPlayer and the Real Alternative codec pack. The open source DAP firmware Rockbox has added support for reading RM video file formats as of 6 July 2009, although only certain codecs contained in RM files are playable.

RealPlayer is a closed source cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats, eg. RM video format. RealPlayer was a popular streaming media player during the early years of the Internet, but in recent years it has been surpassed in market share by Windows Media Player, and, since mid-2007, Apple's iTunes.

Recently, RealNetworks has developed a new container for VBR (variable bitrate) streams, named RMVB (RealMedia variable bitrate).

RealMedia Variable Bitrate (RMVB) is a variable bitrate extension of RM video format. As opposed to the more common RM video format, which holds streaming media encoded at a constant bit rate, RMVB is typically used for multimedia content stored locally. Files using this format have the file extension .rmvb. RMVB files are extremely popular for distributing Asian content, especially Chinese television episodes and movies. For this reason, they have become noticeably present (though not entirely popular) on file sharing platforms such as BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella.