software 2 capture streaming videos

April 23, 2007 5:17 PM

software program for a PC that can capture streaming video files?

i've found some old posts on the web about various programs that can capture streaming video (especially quicktime) that's being watched on one's PC but those posts are fairly old and technology moves pretty fast so if there's a program you'd recommend, i'm very interested in looking it up on the web.

thanks!

posted by wondering to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I'm not an expert, but I use a firefox extension called "ook!" and another one called "VideoDownloader" to download streaming videos off of YouTube, etc.

I think I've heard of a program called VideoGet, but I don't know anything about it. It might be worth a google search though.
posted by Alabaster at 5:39 PM on April 23, 2007

I use Net Transport for streaming video/audio and it usually works pretty well.
posted by dhammond at 5:55 PM on April 23, 2007

VLC might be what you're after; you can point it to the streaming file you want to grab, and tell it to output the file to disk rather than displaying it. It doesn't always work perfectly, though.

Mplayer can do a similar thing - I've found it to work better, work with more formats, and be more reliable - however, it has a high barrier to entry, you have to run it from the command line and give it various command line options. However, this tutorial should give you some clues. The tutorial is aimed towards Linux users, but the command line options should be the same for Windows versions of Mplayer.
posted by Jimbob at 6:17 PM on April 23, 2007

SDP Multimedia works wonders. It'll grab ASX files, MMS protocool, and more.
posted by niles at 9:44 PM on April 23, 2007

mplayer is spectacularly great.

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://url/to/file.rm

is the command for capturing RM streams. it works amazingly.

Below is a great little perl script I wrote for Windows with ActivePerl to capture a set of .rm files (each an hour or two long) without having to sit there and start each one manually. It will skip any .rms with corrisponding .rams, which makes it easy to pause/finish later (just make sure to delete partially finished ones - the script isn't that good).


#!/usr/bin/perl
#

$ab = `dir *.rm`;

@arr = split '\n', $ab;

foreach(@arr)
{
chomp;
/224 (.*)/; # this just parses output of the 'dir' command. 224 was the easiest way for me to grab the filename, but you should replace the regex as appropriate.
if(length $1 != 0)
{
$origname = $1;
$fname = $1;
$fname =~ s/\.rm/\.ram/;
if(-e $fname)
{
print "File " . $fname . " already exists, skipping\n";
next;
}
else
{
print "Starting on file " . $origname . "...\n\n" ;

open(IN, "< . $origname);br> $url = ;
chomp $url;
print "mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile " . $fname . " -dumpstream \"" . $url . "\"\n";
$str = "C:\\mplayer\\mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile " . $fname . " -dumpstream \"" . $url . "\"";
system $str;
print "\n********************************\n\n";
close(IN);

}

}
}

posted by devilsbrigade at 12:50 AM on April 24, 2007

thanks for the comments and suggestions. i'll follow up and checking each of those programs out ;-)
posted by wondering at 5:41 PM on April 24, 2007

You can get NetTransport's last freeware version from Last Freeware Version.
posted by closetphilosopher at 11:39 AM on April 25, 2007