Saturday, April 24, 2010

How To Convert Webex Recording (.arf) files to Other Formats

MS WINDOWS / APPLE MAC:

Download arf player from Webex download page and install it.
open the arf file in the player and convert the recording to wmv or swf format.
File -> Convert -> wmv or swf
URL to download player: http://www.webex.com/downloadplayer.html

LINUX:

Download nbr2mp4 converter from Webex download page.
The setup file is script file nbr2mp4.sh
Installation is command line. At the shell prompt, issue the following command
sh nbr2mp4.sh
Note the directory where it is installed.
Copy all the arf files to that directory.
Go to shell prompt and cd to that directory.
Then issue the following command,
./nbr2mp4 filename.arf ./ n
where
filename.arf is the webex arf recording file that needs to be converted
./ denotes that the converted files be placed in the present (same) directory
n is a number from 3 - 10 and denotes the frame rate. The higher the frame rate the higher is the quality. But, generally the median is good enough.
Eg:
arf file = myrecording.arf
frame rate = 6
then the command is
./nbr2mp4 myrecording.arf ./ 6

URL to download nbr2mp4 converter:
http://support.webex.com/support/downloads.html

11 comments:

Alejandro Acosta said...

Hi,
nbr2mp4 does not look available anymore. Do you have any other link where to find it?

Anonymous said...

Hi, I found a direct link as it is missing on the download page:

http://support.webex.com/supportutilities/nbr2mp4.tar

Anonymous said...

not useful :(

Anonymous said...

after googling for the .arf convertor, none of the links I found had the download on it. However a direct search for 'nbr2mp4' gave me this link:

http://www.webex.co.uk/support/downloads.html

which worked for me.

Sireesha said...

Hi,
I installed the nbr2mp4.tar in my server.when I run the conversion command ./nbr2mp4 file.arf ./ 6 , its giving message like 'nbr2mp4: unable to open display ""
'. what other settings needed pls suggest.I need the solution asap.Please help.

Aman Hardikar said...

Hi Sireesha,

Which desktop management software are you using? If you are running on a linux server, you might need an X-windows system. The error might be because of a lack of X-windows system (KDE / GNOME / ..).

Harish Varada said...

Hi Aman Hardikar,

I was trying to convert .arf file to a simpler .mp4 file following your instructions given above. But, I couldn't see any resultant output for the past 10 hours of running the following command:

harish@harish:~/nbr2_mp4$ ./nbr2mp4 30mb.arf ./ 3
Converting /home/harish/nbr2_mp4/30mb.arf to /home/harish/nbr2_mp4/./30mb.mp4
Retrieving video data, fps=3...

The file I'm trying to run is a small arf file of size 32MB.

Can you please help me out sorting this.?

Thanks in advance.

Harish.Varada

Aman Hardikar said...

The latest NBR2 player from Cisco can be used to view and convert a webex .arf file to wmv / swf or mp4. It is available at http://www.webex.com/play-webex-recording.html

Sireesha said...

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.I installed the x-windows in the linux server. When I run the commands in shell,its giving message like
"Converting /root/nbr2_mp4/file.arf to /root/nbr2_mp4/./file.mp4
Retrieving video data, fps=5..." without any response and more over mp4 file is also not created.I need a linux based solution for conversion.Please help me.

Thanks,
Sireesha

Gus said...

Hi Sireesha
I know, your question is very old; but I have the same problem right now. Did you solve it?
Thanks in advance.
Gustavo

Tomminy said...

With iDealshare VideoGo you can easily convert ARF to WMV without information and quality loss.https://www.idealshare.net/video-converter/convert-arf-to-wmv.html