If you happen to be in the market for a streaming recorder, I hope this short article will describe some of the key advantages as well as providing you essential information on exactly how this is actually carried out correctly, and providing guaranteed results 100% of the time.
These days, I seem to record streaming video pretty frequently so much so that it has got to the point in time where my laptop computer has turned into a kind of ‘centralized data center’. I literally have almost everything I want in one single place: my laptop computer. I have my work, personal files, photos, my personal music files and now, almost all my preferred 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 multimedia in different places. I had songs on CD’s, pen-drives as well as my iPod, videos on VHS, DVD, as well as my hard-drive media-center. Quite simply, I had all this media ‘stuff’ spread all over the place and it was starting to be genuinely difficult to find what I wanted quickly.
I know that everything is online these days but what happens if you have to travel on business or go on vacation? Naturally, you could use your cell data connection, find a coffee-shop or nearby mall with free wireless Internet access, or even use the hotel’s WiFi service. However that can turn out to be costly, possibly unreliable or in some locations even impossible.
So now what I do is simply download or record the video from my favorite sites from the web, keep it on my laptop computer and now watch it when I like and wherever I like.
In this short article, I am going to focus on recording streaming video. Usually, streaming video or audio is sent to your computer using a special method of communication called RTMP (“Real Time Messaging Protocol”) which was developed by Adobe Systems – a respected player in the multimedia software business.
There are two ways to record streaming video. The first technique is to use a special software application to record or download the streaming video to a video file in your computer. It does this ‘in the background’ whilst you actually watch the video itself. The primary advantage of this method is that the quality of video (and audio) is generally excellent. Unfortunately, there are several broadcasters (for example, the UK’s Channel 4 on-demand service) which have somewhat clever detection mechanisms which prevent users from achieving this. So if this fails, you have to move to the second method which is called ‘screen capture’. Once again, using special software, you can literally record your computer monitor (or just an area of it) and once the program finishes, you simply click on the STOP button and a video file is stored on your hard drive. Whilst the quality is not as great as the first approach, at least it works 100% of the time but rather annoyingly; you simply cannot use your computer whilst it’s recording. So yes, it is annoying but at least you get to record the video.
Using either of these techniques, you’re assured to get the video onto your computer without any difficulties.
If you’re interested in learning more about what a streaming recorder can do and additional subjects related to personal multimedia, please pop over to my blog for further information: http://www.streamingrecorder.org/