At the moment, there aren’t any Intel-native Real Media encoders for Mac. This means that Universal Binary applications running on an Intel Mac can’t encode to .rm files. The main “batch encode” application for Mac – Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite 4.5 – has this problem. But as ever, there is a solution.

If you’re using Squeeze 4.5 – which is now a Universal Binary – you’ll find that when it launches on an Intel Mac, it doesn’t list “Real Media (.rm)” in its “Format & Compression Settings” pane. (You can see this in the 30-day trial version, too.)

What you’ll need to do is to force Squeeze to start up under Rosetta – Apple’s technology for running PowerPC applications on Intel Macs. This will force Squeeze to use its PowerPC binary, not its Intel binary.

To do this, find the Squeeze application – “Squeeze.app” – on your hard disk, in your Applications folder. Select the application in the finder, and press Apple-i to open a Get Info window for the application. Check the “Open using Rosetta” box (just underneath the Color labels in the Get Info window), and close the Get Info window.

Launch Squeeze again, and it will launch using the PowerPC binary version of the application. You should find that you now have a set of Real Media presets in the “Format & Compression Settings” pane. These can be used to encode Real Media files. It won’t be as fast as encoding to other video formats when running the Intel-native Squeeze binary, but it will work!

If you subsequently want to encode to other formats at full encoding speed, then you can simply undo the above process to switch back to using the Intel binary. Open the Get Info window, uncheck the Open using Rosetta box, and close the Get Info window. Squeeze will now launch its Intel-native version, enabling you to encode the Intel-savvy formats at native speeds.

Update 2 April 2008: Symbiosis have released Squeeze 5 for Mac and PC. However, it still doesn’t support Real Media encoding for Intel Macs. Hopefully the workaround described above will still work.