To get started at the VLC GUI, go "File\Open Capture Device." and select mode =DirectShow and video device = UScreenCapture. You must start out with decent source video that does not jerk or pause. Your internet connection must be capable of streaming high-speed video. Play your source video stream in a player - windowed, not full-screen.
It is very convienient to be able to set your capture software to record over-night and terminate when the source video is over. Unfortunate, since VLC does not have a working timed recording feature (except for the un-fathomable VLM). This works great with VLC version 0.8.6.Īll of my DirectShow-based capture tools accept this codec except for Beyond TV. UScreenCapture allows me to capture all or part of the screen at up to 30 frames per second. I discovered the free DirectShow screen capture codec called UScreenCapture from Unreal Streaming Technologies. My second attempt allowed me to get rid of the video tuner hardware loop-back. Any capture software that accepts DirectShow input devices works. This worked very well and I was able to capture any streaming video that I could display on my screen, using Beyond TV for timed recording or VLC for attended sessions. I routed the headphone jack into the capture box's "Audio In" port to capture computer audio. I plugged the S-video port of my HP laptop into the tuner to capture the laptop's screen video. All good video tuner cards have on-board MPEG encoders, so you are streaming MPEG-encoded video/audio into your compuer from the get-go. My first attempt was to fall back on my old stand-by USB video capture tuner. So I set out to develop my own video stream capture techniques, with DVD Flick-compatible MPEG-2 format as the end target - techniques to record video un-hindered by DRM or copy-protection schemes. Off-the-shelf products like WM Capture and Camtassia produce jerky full-motion video captures with funky colors. DRM hacking is illegal, too much work and is becoming less and less feasable.Ģ. My research brought me to the following conclusions:ġ. The most popular ones are WM Capture, Camtassia and Daniusoft. Since they all have an audio capture feature, these can be configured to capture full-motion video as well. There are also a number of commercial "Screencasting" tools, originally intended to be used in education to capture on-screen lectures and tutorials. One can also attempt to find the temporary hard disk location where the video stream is being buffered and copy it from there. The commercial product WM Recorder does this automatically. Stream capture of video sources can of course be accomplished with VLC, if you can detect the stream and determine its URL. The new Silverlight-based Netflix viewer now prevents the capture of the entire Netflix stream by repeatedly opening and closing the stream, putting an end to that exploit.
So the hackers would then apply a series of free tools such as UnDRM and FairUse4WM to remove the DRM, allowing the file to be copied, viewed or burnt to DVD. The hitch is that this file is encoded/protected with DRM and is unviewable without online authorization from Netflix.
With the Netflix viewing system of that time, it was possible to download the entire movie to a large WMV file using a free hacking tool called NetFlixBrowser. In 2007 there was a furior over someone having broken the DRM encoding on Netflix "Instant view" streaming movie downloads. Everyone is doing it and there are dozens of software tools and techniques for doing this. Occasionally I would like to record these too, so I started to do some research.Ĭapturing YouTube is simple - just extract the download URL from the current YouTube web-page and use it to download the video that you have selected. My favorite DVD burning software is currently DVD Flick, since it can burn DVD-compatable MPEG-2 files directly to DVD without a lengthy encoding process.īut recently I have been downloading a lot of streaming video - YouTube, instant movies, streaming TV programs, etc. The last two are open source (free) software. I have been doing this for years using such capture software as Snapstream Beyond TV, VideoDub and of course VLC.
It is well known that anyone can record TV programming to a PC by using a video capture card to create a digital video stream that can be captured on a PC.
If you want to skip the history lession, scroll down to HOW TO DO IT WITH VLC: The following is intended for Windows users only.