Robust streaming audio/video capture software discovered

[s1m0n]

As part of my dayjob, I've recently been learning more about QuickTime streaming video than I thought I'd ever want to know, but this has paid off with a solution to what has been a long-time frustration: saving streaming audio and video signals locally.

The solution turns out to be an elegant peice of open source software called VideoLan or the VLC Media Player. This is a project begun by students at a technical university in Paris, but which is now an online collaborative community like Audicity or Mozilla.

VLC is multiheaded. It can play steeaming audio or video in many formats, transcode them on the fly into other formats, and then save them locally or serve them up to a network or the internet.

The part I'm interested in is its ability to--like quicktime, real audio or the windows media player--play a streamed video from an internet URL but without their restrictions on recompiling and saving the packets of data. VLC will happily ignore QuickTime's 'disable local save' flag, for instance.

With the VLC media player installed, capturing a data stream could hardly be easier: I run a wizard, paste the URL of the stream I want to play or capture into a textbox, check off a few formatting preference questions, supply a filename and path that I want the copy to be saved under, and click "next".

And that's it; I know have a copy of the source file.

~~

I tried it out with a track from The Rambles of Kitty, a Comhaltas website containing MP3s of a long out of print LP. I was particularly interested in track 16, a song called Mary on the Banks of the Lee, because this is the song version of an air I learned years and years ago from a recording of philadelphia flute player Richard Hughes. He played it as an air under the name "the Banks of the Lee". I don't know anyone else who plays it. I liked it enough that I learned it from the record when I was first learning to play the flute.

~~

Here's how VLC worked:

Going to the page I had bookmarked, I clicked on the link to the track I want to capture, and then clicked on the "download audio" link. This pops up my browser's quicktime plug-in, which plays the track. I put quicktime on pause, and then copied the URL (blahblah.mp3) to my clipboard. I closed the quicktime window.

Opening VLC, I then started up the capture wizard, checked the "stream/copy to file" option, pasted the copied url into the appropriate box, and assigned it a filename in the my_documents folder, and hit "next'. There are a couple of other options concerning the format I wanted it saved in. I checked "MP3" and "raw" because I want the source file as is.

Finishing the wizard, I ran it, playing the track, and then checked my docs--and there's the mp3 file: voila!

~~

This looks like a great way to save streamed RTE radio programs for playing on my iPod during my commute, for example. Or anything else, actually. It's a useful program,. I've been looking for something like it for a long while.

~~

It also has a feature in which you can program in a playlist of files or URLs which it will play in sequence as specified. I think with not much tinkering, I could set it to record specified URLs at specified times, enabling me to program it to listed to and record shows in my absense.

[s1m0n]

Note to the scrupulous -- the comhaltas page specifies:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Copying it for non-commercial purposes is legal.

[peeplj]

s1m0n, thank you so much for posting this!

--James

[mukade]

VLC is a nice little player I have been using for while.

For Youtube and other videos I just use the bog-standard Real player to download streams. It adds a menu item 'download to Real Player' when you right click over a video or sound link.

MUkade

[djm]

There are many similar programs for capturing audio off the net. Capturing and converting video is proving to be more challenging. Stuff like TV shows on TG4 are not only in Real format, they are also encoded for security. There are lots of packages that say they can convert Real video so that you can burn it to DVD, but few of them tell you they can't handle security encryption until after you've paid for them (and then refuse to refund you). WMRecorder by Applian is one such rip-off.

One that I found to work was MPEG Encoder from ImTOO. I was able to save the video to my PC and convert it to a standard MPEG format, but it can't handle anything newer than Real version 10, and eventually I had to remove Real from my system to get the ImTOO codecs to work - a real chore to get anything done.

I have removed QuickTime completely from my system. It is a virus, the way it insinuates itself throughout your entire system, taking over everything, and doing its damnedest to prevent you from playing anything in Real formats. There are stripped down versions of QuickTime that include just the bits your browser needs to view files in proprietary QuickTime formats. The rest can be avoided.

djm

[TonyHiggins]

So, Simon, here's a flash video I'd like to try to save. I'm not finding the link to the video, only the web page it's on. Any ideas?
http://comhaltas.ie/music/detail/comhal ... a_sweeney/
Tony

[s1m0n]

So, Simon, here's a flash video I'd like to try to save. I'm not finding the link to the video, only the web page it's on. Any ideas?
http://comhaltas.ie/music/detail/comhal ... a_sweeney/
Tony

Doing a 'view source' on the page you link reveals this promising looking chunk of code:

movie:"/swf/flvplayer.swf",width:"426",height:"345",majorversion:"7",build:"0",bgcolor:"#FFFFFF",
flashvars:"file=http://media.comhaltas.ie/video/cl205/cl205_1Med.flv&showdigits=true&height=400&autostart=false"};

I'm at work and unable to test it, but my guess is that the part in bold is the URL you want.

[fearfaoin]

movie:"/swf/flvplayer.swf",width:"426",height:"345",majorversion:"7",build:"0",bgcolor:"#FFFFFF",
flashvars:"file=http://media.comhaltas.ie/video/cl205/cl205_1Med.flv&showdigits=true&height=400&autostart=false"};

I'm at work and unable to test it, but my guess is that the part in bold is the URL you want.

Yup, that's it. I haven't downloaded VideoLan yet, but I passed that URL to mplayer, and it streamed just fine.

[s1m0n]

Yup, that's it.

Sometimes, there's no substitute for nosily poking around backstage.

[fearfaoin]

OK, I downloaded it. It's replaced mplayer in my heart. I just got the Sweeney
video saved as an MPEG. Also, I really need to learn Monaghan's Jig.

The command line interface isn't very intuitive, but once tackled it should let
you save things starting at a certain times, if you combine it with a scheduler.

So, I can schedule the following command to start saving from my local NPR
stream into a file called wunc_stream.mp3

Code: Select all

vlc http://audio-mp3.ibiblio.org:8000/wunc --demux=dump --demuxdump-file="wunc_stream.mp3"

My friend does something similar with mplayer to record Car Talk every week.

[TonyHiggins]

Thanks much. I'll work on that. I like Emma's version of Monaghan Jig better than the weak abc transcription of Mary Bergin's version I have. So, I'll get her playing onto a slow downer and transcribe it.
Tony

[tuaz]

What I like about it is that for large downloads, you can use VLC to play the partially downloaded file sections ( .part file type/format) of a media file before it's fully downloaded.

BTW, if you use Firefox and want to download flash videos (.flv file type, which can be opened with VLC), or other media files hidden or embedded within a webpage, install the extension Downloadhelper to Firefox.

With that, you could, for example, download that Emma Sweeney Flash vid straight off the webpage just by clicking on DLHelper's revolving icon at the top of your browser.

[Enclose]

Nice, I didn't know you could do all this with VLC. The only thing I used it for was playing formats or codecs Windows Media Player didn't recognize. Guess I'll be using VLC more often now Thanks for sharing

[FJohnSharp]

Thanks much. I'll work on that. I like Emma's version of Monaghan Jig better than the weak abc transcription of Mary Bergin's version I have. So, I'll get her playing onto a slow downer and transcribe it.
Tony

I would be interested in that transcription when it's finished. I have the ABC version which is NOT as close to Mary's version as it would have you believe. I heard Emma's version the other day and I really like it.

[Bloomfield]

I tried it out with a track from The Rambles of Kitty, a Comhaltas website containing MP3s of a long out of print LP. I was particularly interested in track 16, a song called Mary on the Banks of the Lee, because this is the song version of an air I learned years and years ago from a recording of philadelphia flute player Richard Hughes. He played it as an air under the name "the Banks of the Lee". I don't know anyone else who plays it. I liked it enough that I learned it from the record when I was first learning to play the flute.

Once the mp3 is playing in the browser plug-in, why don't you just select "save page" which will give you the mp3 file to save on your machine.