If you are interested in getting hold of a streaming recorder, I hope this short article will offer you with helpful information on the advantages, just how this works and what is the easiest way to accomplish this.
I happen to record streaming video pretty regularly these days and it has got to the stage that my laptop has transformed into some kind of 'centralized data center'. My laptop computer has virtually become the one single place where I have everything. I have my work, personal documents, photos, my personal music and now, almost all my favorite movies and shows all in one place. This came quite by accident and occurred when I started going a bit loony having all types of multi media in different places. I had my music on CD's, my iPod and lord knows how many memory sticks; then there were movies on DVD's and on my home hard-drive / DVD player. Basically, I had all this media 'stuff' spread all over the place and it was turning out to be genuinely awkward to locate what I wanted quickly.
Now it is all very well having video and music made available online but what happens when you are out of town? Of course, you could use your mobile data link, pop down to your nearby local cafe or even connect to the Net with the hotel's WiFi service. But I have discovered that this is often cumbersome or even turns out to be quite costly in the end (have a shot at watching a movie on your mobile data connection and you are going to fall down when you get the bill!).
So my answer was to basically download or record the video from my preferred sites and after that watch it when and where ever I want (when I had the time, when I felt like it, etc.).
In this short article, I'm going to focus on recording streaming video. The majority of streaming video or audio is delivered to your computer using something called RTMP ("Real Time Messaging Protocol") which is really a specific method of communication to take care of streaming content over the internet (RTMP was developed by Adobe Systems - a leading player in the multimedia software business).
There are two principle strategies to record streaming video.
The first one is by using software to download or record the online video into a file found on your hard-drive. It does this 'in the background' whilst you actually view the video itself. The major advantage of this method is that the quality of video (and audio) is normally excellent. However, there are some broadcasters (for instance, the UK's Channel 4 on-demand service) that have rather clever detection mechanisms which prevent people from achieving this.
So if this fails, you need to proceed to the second technique which is known as 'screen capture'. Once again, using special software, you basically record a region of your screen (or even the full screen itself) and when the TV program ends, you hit the STOP button and the video is saved to a file on your hard disk. Whilst the quality isn't as great as the first approach, at least it works 100% of the time but rather irritatingly, you can't use your computer whilst it's recording. So yes, it is a pain but at least you get to record the video.
With these two techniques, you're guaranteed to get the video onto your computer without any difficulty whatsoever.
If you're interested in learning more and seeing some video demos of how I go about recording streaming video, please head over to my blog at: http://www.streamingrecorder.org/
Andy J Taylor
Freelance Multimedia Consultant
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