recording sure streams in realtime

oj oscillation · Post by **oj oscillation** » 12/02/2003 - 13:36

yo, ya`ll !
i would like to save some flash and real player movies as an avi or mpeg file or something like that, so i don`t need to be online and stream em from the web.
is there a proggie that can record flash animations or real player streams in realtime onto my harddrive ?
oli

putzi · Post by **putzi** » 12/02/2003 - 19:32

AFAIK you can save Flash always to your hard disk, just have a look at the HTML and get the URL to save the Flash-file.
With Real, this is a different story, as these movies are actually streamed. The only way I know sounds stupid, but works: output the movies in fullscreen to the TV-out and capture it on another PC with a TV-capture-card.

You havenÃ‚Â´t asked for it, but while I am at it: Windows Media Video is not always streamed and can also be saved to disk. Simply wait until playback starts inside the Internet Explorer frame and right-click for properties to see the HTML-source. If there is some URL ending with ".wmv", this is a file you can download. The saving may work only if you use Opera or Mozilla instead then, because IE is already instructed to play the file back, not saving it to disk. Depends on the Windows-version and what IE and what Media Player have been installed, depending on the settings you have chosen.
Example where this works:
http://terrytate.reebok.com/watch.asp
The URLs you can find there are e.g.:
http://reebok.com.edgesuite.net/lastexi ... ld_dsl.wmv
http://reebok.com.edgesuite.net/lastexi ... ay_dsl.wmv
(Good commercials, btw!)

oj oscillation · Post by **oj oscillation** » 12/02/2003 - 19:53

thanx for the tips, putzi. gonna try em.

putzi · Post by **putzi** » 12/02/2003 - 22:45

oj oscillation wrote:searchin for a hit-button plug in

Something like this???

http://www.d418.com/msHitWizard.jpg

Vosla · Post by **Vosla** » 12/02/2003 - 22:48

hehehe... now that's a nice one, putzi...

Monty · Post by **Monty** » 13/02/2003 - 2:53

Referring to .rm and .asf-files, they can easily be captured in their original format by "Streambox VCR Suite". This is a hacked improvement of the "Streambox Ripper" by 2B Systems.

I tested it a long time ago and it worked fine.

The original download-link is dead, but I just found another one:
http://streamboxsuite.xrs.net/
On this page, there is also a link to "The Streaming Media Recording Forum" which may help too.

A detailed guide for the prog seems to be here:
http://alawoona.netfirms.com/started.htm
But I think you won't need this help as it's really easy to understand.

For the other formats I don't know a special tool, but you can try a screen-action capturing software like hypercam ( http://www.hyperionics.com/ ).
As they explicitly say that it's not intended for the re-recording of other video clips from the screen i'm very optimistic that it will work.

Finally: Please ignore my tips, cause i just realized that they are totally illegal.

Cheers,
Monty

putzi · Post by **putzi** » 13/02/2003 - 8:26

Monty wrote: For the other formats I don't know a special tool, but you can try a screen-action capturing software like hypercam.
As they explicitly say that it's not intended for the re-recording of other video clips from the screen i'm very optimistic that it will work.

This will probably not work because the players for streaming video
use a different method of writing into the screen than the GUI of any regular application, maybe it is even some MS-feature for protecting the content. Their marketing-department even mentioned some protection features in DirectX 8. That is why I came up with the the TV-output thingy:
analogue bypassing of all frontiers by all means

oj oscillation · Post by **oj oscillation** » 13/02/2003 - 12:58

yes, putzi. this could be my fav plug. if the vst version comes out, i`ll get it.
@monty: i`ll try ur suggestions, if they would be legal.

have a nice day, peepz.

ruiner · Post by **ruiner** » 13/02/2003 - 15:15

Since I don't use Real Media in any capacity I can't advise you on that, however Windows Media (asf,asx,wmv,etc) while a good quality format doesn't stream worth a crap in my experience, so I pretty much have to download it to view it. ASF Recorder has been quite a friend. :)

use a different method of writing into the screen than the GUI of any regular application, maybe it is even some MS-feature for protecting the content

It's not an MS Feature, it's a video card feature called the overlay. It's a more stable and smoother way of handling FMV as you aren't writing directly to the screen memory, but to the Overlay. The Vid-card then uses chroma keying to replace a block of a specific color with the video. You can disable the overlay by turning off all hardware accelleration. If you've ever noticed the block of pins on a video card you've never actually had to use it's a hardware pipe into the overlay, used mostly by hardware decoders (MPEG2/DVD) and the like.