RealMedia Splitter 1.9.1.32

An .RM or .RMVB file that will not open on Windows is not damaged, and it does not mean you have to reinstall RealPlayer.

RealMedia Splitter is a small DirectShow filter that teaches Windows how to read the container, without the suite, the background services or the account prompts that came with it.

It is worth saying early that this is not the only route, and for a lot of people it is not the shortest one.

What It Actually Does

Playing a video file takes two separate components, and the difference matters here more than usual.

A splitter reads the container and pulls the audio and video streams out of it. A decoder then turns those streams into sound and picture.

When a DirectShow player opens an .RM file, it asks Windows which registered filter can handle that container. With no RealMedia splitter registered, the answer is none, and the player gives up before decoding ever starts.

This filter registers itself as that answer. If the splitter/decoder split is new to you, Codecs vs Containers is the clearest explanation of it on the site.

One thing it will not fix: the built-in Windows Films and TV app runs on Media Foundation rather than DirectShow, so it will never open these files no matter what you register.

What It Plays, and What a .ram File Actually Is

The filter handles the RealMedia containers: .rm and .rmvb video, and .ra RealAudio.

This matters because it is the single most common reason people conclude the filter is broken. The reviews on this page have been saying so since 2006, and they are right.

Live RealMedia streaming is outside what a splitter does at all. Local files are the entire use case.

When This Is the Right Tool, and When It Is Not

VLC Media Player opens .rm and .rmvb files with nothing installed, because it carries its own decoders and ignores the DirectShow stack entirely.

If you have a handful of old files and just want to watch them, that is the shorter road and you can stop reading here. Installing a system filter to watch four clips is more work than the clips are worth.

The case for the filter is different and narrower. It registers system-wide, so every DirectShow application on the machine gains RealMedia support, not one player.

That is what you want if a media manager needs to generate thumbnails from an .rmvb archive, if an old editing or conversion tool has to read the files, or if you are working through hundreds of them and would rather not change how the rest of your setup behaves.

For anything else, a player that decodes RealMedia internally is less work than a system filter. MPC-BE is the lightweight option and PotPlayer the feature-heavy one.

KMPlayer carries the same built-in support if you already use it.

Installing It, and Checking It Registered

The filter needs a working DirectX installation, which every Windows version since XP has had, and nothing else.

Run the installer and accept the defaults. It registers itself with Windows on the way through, and there is no configuration step afterwards.

Because nothing visible happens, people cannot tell whether it worked, which is the other complaint running through the reviews here. The quickest check is simply to open an .rm file in a DirectShow player and see whether it plays.

If it does not, the Codec Troubleshooter will tell you which filter or decoder your DirectShow chain is still missing, and the Codec Finder will confirm the file is genuinely RealMedia rather than something misnamed.

For a bare .ax filter file rather than the installer, How to Register and Unregister DLL and AX Codec Filter Files covers the regsvr32 route and the elevation rules that break it.

If You Want the Whole RealMedia Stack Instead

Real Alternative bundles the RealMedia codecs, a splitter and a copy of the original Media Player Classic, so it covers decoding as well as container reading.

Be clear about what you are taking on, though. Real Alternative 2.0.2 dates from February 2010 and has not been touched since, and the browser plugins it ships were built for Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape.

It still does its job on an offline archive, and 37 million downloads say it did that job well. It is a frozen package rather than a newer one, which is the opposite of how this page used to describe it.

If you would rather have breadth from something maintained, K-Lite Codec Pack is the successor to the whole alternative-codec idea, and its Mega edition historically absorbed what Real Alternative did.

Two related pages worth knowing about: RealPlayer itself, if you want to see what this filter exists to avoid, and QuickTime Alternative for the same problem with old .mov files.

The Sibling Filter

RealMedia Splitter comes from a family of container-specific DirectShow filters that install cleanly alongside each other.

Flash Video Splitter is the same idea applied to FLV, from the same developer and on the same version number, and old archives tend to contain both formats. The rest of the playback options sit on the Media Players page.

Quick questions

Download RealMedia Splitter if system-wide RealMedia support is what you need, or tell us how you got on - this page has more complaints than answers on it, and that is worth changing.