Need to screen-capture a webpage and video in embedded movie form

July 26, 2009 11:51 PM

How to capture webpage with embedded video?

Hi everyone.

I'm trying to make a video screen capture of a webpage with an embedded video, something that can be saved as a movie and burned onto a dvd. The idea is to capture a video of the webpage scrolling down to the embedded video, then of the video playing.

It needs to be reasonably high quality: it's for litigation. I'm planning to sue a consumer goods manufacturer under a consumer protection statute for misrepresenting the quality of the goods it sells in an advertising video embedded on its product website.

Can someone please give me a walkthrough on how to do that? I have both Mac and PC (and, in extremis, ubuntu linux) available. I don't want to just point a camera at the screen unless there are no other options. (for one thing, I tried that with my macbook camera and the text was basically unreadable, plus it came out mirror image.)

Thanks!

posted by paultopia to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

(Addendum: I glanced at the previous threads, but the only thing that seems to be suggested to do full-on video is a program called fraps, which I can't get to work...)
posted by paultopia at 11:59 PM on July 26, 2009

I'm no trial lawyer, but if you use Firefox to view the page you can go to Tools menu, select Page Info, and save the movie to disk if it is not streaming. Then you can just create a webarchive in Safari or however Firefox does it and you have the contents of the page captured for further use.
posted by @troy at 12:01 AM on July 27, 2009

I'd try the free CamStudio if you're running Windows. It will produce an AVI (you can use VLC to play the video on a Mac) or FLV video of whatever happens on your screen.
posted by fearthehat at 12:22 AM on July 27, 2009

I haven't specifically tried to do this before so I can't remark on whether you'll be successful, but in case it doesn't work, you could do the pointing-camera-at-screen thing as proof that the video comes from the web site, then try capturing the stream directly to provide a high-resolution readable version of the video. VLC which fearthehat mentioned does a pretty good job capturing streaming video in my experience.

(One side note: if what you're capturing turns out to be a Windows Media file, you often have to first track down the URL of an .asx file and save that to your hard drive, then open it with a text editor to get the real address of a .wmv file to provide to VLC.)
posted by XMLicious at 12:38 AM on July 27, 2009

Thanks fearthehat, that worked!
posted by paultopia at 12:41 AM on July 27, 2009

There's also a variety of tools to record clips of your screen for OSX, like Snapz Pro X, which offers a free trial...
posted by kolophon at 9:42 AM on July 27, 2009