My RealCache program is getting there, though while making it, I decided that change the scope a little.

RealPlayer streams aren't actually that big; Annie Mac's latest 2 hour show comes in at under 30Mb. So, downloading them while my broadband cap isn't in place isn't so much of a priority. However, with my shiny new C550, being able to take shows like that on the move would be a huge bonus, like podcasting but for RealPlayer streams. You'd think it'd be easy.

In fact, what I considered would be the most difficult task was actually the easiest. Using MPlayer, you can dump the raw stream (in real-time, unfortunately) to a file on your disk, taking up all of 30Mb. Wonderful! Of course, Real decided not to grace the Smartphone with a version of RealPlayer, and the 'hacky' ways of getting it to run on the device haven't worked out so well. So, clearly I need to convert the .ra file I've obtained from the net to something more useful for my phone. How about Ogg?

Now, we can't do that directly, so we need to convert the .ra file into something more base, like a PCM file. This is raw wave data, the same as a CD. So, by the power of a little maths, we can see that at 10Mb per second of audio, a two-hour show is going to need around about 1.2Gb of space to reside in. Christ. Still, I persevere.

Now I have my 1.2Gb wave file, I can use the Ogg Vorbis encoder to get that down to a lovely Ogg file for playback in TCPMP, an alternative to Windows Media Player that has the added bonus of supporting Xvid and DivX files. After encoding, it looks like I've got a 40Mb ish file. That's not too bad in reality, it'd be equivalent in WMA and an MP3 of comparable audio quality would have been upward of 70Mb.

So on my 1Gb memory card, my phone can happily accommodate upwards of 20 Annie Mac shows. Awesome! 40+ hours of her delightful, dulcet tones... Shame that the entire process takes a goddamn lifetime and over a gig of storage, mind. I'll see if I can't have RealCache automate the whole thing...