It really works, just mencoder does sometimes not a very good job (sometimes the produced files are corrupt) so my second approach is now to use mplayer instead of mencoder to first download the real-stream and then use mencoder to actually convert it to whatever :-)

E.g.: mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://blabla.rm

then the real-stream can be played back using Real-Player or can be converted with mencoder.

Currently I have my own private Stream-Collection of my favorite TV-Station and will watch Evening-News, and such on my phone :-)

That's good news! It sounds like you are the author of the original MacOSXHint? Are you getting better results when you're converting a local file rather than a streamed one?

I've had no luck trying to convert realvideo in the past - Mencoder here I come!