ARF file tips?

jerrys

Senior Contributor Location: New Britain, CT, USA (between New York and Boston) Joined: Feb 10, 2010 21:36 Messages: 1038 Offline

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Nov 16, 2013 15:52

No, my dog doesn't have a camcorder. I don't even own a dog. I'm looking for suggestions.

ARF files are what you get when you have a recorded WebEx session. ARF is a proprietary format. There is a player that you can download that lets you watch recorded WebEx sessions offline, at your leisure; but my idea of leisure is a comfy chair and a big screen.

Cisco does make available a conversion program that converts ARF to WMV; but they are rather queer WMVs. For one thing, the frame rate is 5/sec. For another, the audio is out of step with the video by minutes.

I've played these suckers in every player I can thing of, and the results are the same; so it's pretty clear that it's the WMVs that are the problem. Fortunately, I'm only interested in the slides; so there's no lip-synching involved.

Here's where it gets quite strange. PD12 displays a sound waveform towards the end (and again, I mean several minutes) of the audio track; but there's no sound. (I've confirmed that there's no sound by playing it in other programs.) It takes some vigorous chopping and sliding to get a decent result.

Has anyone had experience working with ARF files, or the WMV's that come from them?

Any suggestions? Jerry Schwartz

vn800rider

Senior Contributor Location: Darwen, UK Joined: May 15, 2008 04:32 Messages: 1949 Offline

Nov 17, 2013 15:30

Just as info,

"Once the full version of the Network Based Recording player has been installed, you can download and convert WebEx recordings. To do this, complete the following steps:
Find the recording you wish to convert from the My Recorded Meetings page within your company's WebEx page. Select the recording you wish to convert and choose Download.
From the File Download dialog that appears, choose to Open the Network Based Recording.
Once the Network Based Recording player has launched the file, you can begin the conversion process. Go to File from the player's navigation screen, and select Convert. Then, select your desired converted file type from the dropdown list.

Note: It will take approximately as long to convert the WebEx file to another format as the recording is long. Therefore, if you have a one hour recording, you can expect the conversion process to take approximately the same amount of time. For best results, it is also advisable to minimize the use of other applications on your computer during the conversion process."

[From NetApp Community] My Bold

If that's the case, it might be as well to screen capture the Webex and have more control over the output???

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jerrys

Senior Contributor Location: New Britain, CT, USA (between New York and Boston) Joined: Feb 10, 2010 21:36 Messages: 1038 Offline

Nov 17, 2013 16:01

I've been doing it the way WebEx says to do it, exactly as you described.

Yes, it does take a very long time. My impression is that this is not something Cisco wants to encourage. It wouldn't be surprised if that tool is a dead letter, so far as they are concerned. There are no versions for smart phones; in fact, if you do a search you'll see that there are people willing to pay for developing such.

Cisco does, however, let you run a meeting for a smart phone. That tells me that they are paying attention to their mainline strategy.

I'm afraid I don't have any tools that will do a screen capture of two hours.

I think I'm stuck with some time consuming work. Jerry Schwartz

angiepuller

Newbie Joined: Jun 29, 2015 04:58 Messages: 1 Offline

Jun 29, 2015 05:01

ARF, standing for “advanced recording file”, is a file extension for a WebEx advanced recording file from a network-based recording. An ARF file contains the video data, a table of contents, an attendee list, and other information on separate panels. The ARF file extension is for recordings downloaded by the user. The ARF file extension is also used for automatic response files. The *.arf files are WebEx recordings directly downloaded by the user.

However, we often meet problems when open or play ARF files. To open or play ARF files with zone problems, it is nice to convert ARF to MP4, convert ARF to WMV, MP3 or other common video and audio formats.You may find a nice guide on how to convert ARF to MP4, convert ARF to WMV, MP3. Find "Cicever ARF Player" and you can get an easy way to do it.

Hemotory

Newbie Joined: May 15, 2017 04:12 Messages: 1 Offline

May 21, 2017 23:24

In fact ARF file is the proprietary output format of WebEx Online Meeting. For being exclusive, you cannot directly play it on ther devices or players. To deal with it, the first thing is to change to other common formats like MP4 and AVI. I used to refer to http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/wrf-to-mp4.html for answers. And if you think your frame rate is too low, just like what you have mentioned - 5 fps. You should find another video converter which can change the frame rate by using its parameter settings.