How to record IPTV?

April 17, 2006 6:06 PM

Is it possible to record IPTV?

So, I'm a college student and don't have a VCR, let alone DVR. We do get IPTV (Video Furnace) at my school, however. I am wondering if there is anyway, either on Windows XP or Ubuntu, to record a TV show from IPTV onto my computer. I've looked into screencast programs such as Istanbul, but most of them do not record sound output -- only input from a microphone. Also, when I did a practice screencast with Istanbul the space where the IPTV video was showing just turned up black.

I have heard of Windows programs that can record any sound that comes out of your speakers -- are there any programs that can record both the screen and sound? Is there anyway of getting around the blacked out screen? I feel like it should be possible to capture all the sound and images my computer produces, but I just don't know how to do it...

posted by puffin to technology (4 comments total)

DRM is not your friend. Don't buy DRMed products. You're finding out why. They want to make you PAY for EVERY TIME you "consume" their product. And Vista will make this stuff a zillion times harder to break.

You probably need a program that will decode the IPTV stream, but I'm not aware of anything that will do that yet. Trying to record the screen itself would be essentially impossible on an AGP computer... the AGP bus is very slow for reading. (It's extremely fast for writing data out to the video card, but slow for getting it back.) It's pretty unlikely that you'd be able to read the video memory fast enough to save the movie. You _might_ be able to make this work on a PCIe machine. However, you then have a HUGE uncompressed datastream, and have to recompress it, which will make it look bad.

Ultimately, you probably need a hacked client. I have no idea where you'd get one.
posted by Malor at 7:04 PM on April 17, 2006

Cory, is that you?

seriously though... i agree 100% but it sounds like the OP is just provided with this IPTV service as part of his university tuition, so don't jump down his throat.

looking at VF's website, they hint that their stuff is mpeg2-based. i wonder if you could use VLC, assuming they are not encrypting the video. on the other hand, they talk about not needing a special client program, so i wonder exactly how they are doing it. maybe its actually flash-based?
posted by joeblough at 8:38 PM on April 17, 2006

Have you talked to other people at your school? You aren't the first one to deal with this.
posted by bh at 8:46 PM on April 17, 2006

I think if you start googling "video capture software," you'll find what you're looking for if I understand your question. The only one I'm familiar with is Ambrosia's Snapz (I use Wiretap, their audio version) but that's for Macs.
posted by nanojath at 9:17 PM on April 17, 2006