Streaming Recorder

If you’re looking for a simple and effective way to record online TV programs, videos, grab radio or music to your computer for personal use, then please goto THIS SPECIAL POST that I put together which includes a simple video demo on how I actually go about recording streaming video (or, for less techy folks, recording online videos) using a streaming recorder.

I use this method to grab all sorts of things online (I mean, almost everything is going online these days…) : TV programs, radio, music, online conferences or ‘webinars’  and even online training or marketing videos. When it comes to recording online TV programs, once I’ve got it on my computer, I typically connect my laptop to my TV (just to be a bit more sociable!) when my wife & I want to watch something in particular. If you’re interested in connecting your laptop to your TV, there’s information on how to do this further below in this blog.

For me, the main benefits of using this approach are:

(i) First and foremost, I can record TV / video, music, online training videos, etc.. and watch them anytime I want. When I eventually find the time, I can watch what I want, when I went (and also wherever I want if I’m travelling).

(ii) Once I’ve got what I want downloaded, I don’t need an Internet connection to watch or listen to my favorite stuff. This is really useful if you’re travelling since it gets really expensive downloading through your mobile connection or via WiFi charges in a hotel or airport (last year on one trip alone, I blew $120 in wireless charges!….now I just use wireless for email or other essential things). Also, if you don’t happen to have a high-speed connection at home, with this method you can even record stuff with dial-up or other slow connection methods (like satellite). Ok, you have to wait until it downloads but at least, when it’s done, you’ve got on your computer to watch or listen to it whenever you like.

(ii) Since the media you record are nothing more than electronic ‘files’ stored on your computer, this makes it easy to change the ‘name’ of the program just by renaming the name of the file. It’s far less irritating than writing on a DVD (I never seem to have one of those DVD-pens handy…..do you?) and on harddrive DVD-recorders or home ‘media’ centers, changing the name of a program can be a real pain in the neck, and certainly time-consuming.

(iii) You can organize your favorite media into seperate folders on your computer. So for TV, you would put all your documentaries in the “Documentaries” folder, your favorite sporting events in “Sport”, etc. Now you don’t have a stack of DVD’s with different programs on them and saves you the hassle of finding the exact thing you want to watch.

(iv) Even if you don’t want to drag your laptop around at home, it’s very easy to ‘convert’ the grabbed videos to make them compatible with a standard DVD-player. I plan to make a seperate post on how to do this in the not too distant future.

(v) For better or worse, my faithful laptop has become my central ‘repository of information‘. I have my work, my personal photos & home videos and now my favorite programs and music in one single place. I don’t have ‘data’ spread around on that DVD, this HD-recorder, that memory-stick (is my data on that blue, red or yellow one?) and that video-camera. With data being nothing more than a bunch of zero’s and one’s, I’d rather have it all in one place. Obviously, if you’re interested in this approach, you ‘re going to need a large hard-drive but even external drives aren’t outrageously expensive (at least, I don’t think so considering what I’m doing) and in any case, they’re getting cheaper year after year. And of course, it’s vital to keep backups in this situation. In my case, I use software to make automatic backups every night to an external hard-drive to have peace of mind. Of course, some of you may view this as a little bit extreme but I tend to think that with more and more things going ‘electronic’, I simply like to have everything in one simple place. When it comes to backups, needless to say, losing my precious family photos and videos would leave me pretty heart-broken.

Anyway, if you’re interested in recording online media to your computer instead of recording to a DVD or DVD-Harddrive recorder or messing around with DVDs and memory-sticks all around the house, as I said please check this special post I put together which will explain things clearly.

With kind regards, Andy

written by Andy \\ tags: record online marketing videos, record online music, record online video, record training videos, recording online video, streaming recorder, streaming recorder benefits

How to Create Your Personal Online Video Collection

Here’s a simple way of watching anything you want, anytime and anywhere. Want to build your very own video library? Or maybe you need to record your favorite online radio stations and music services like Spotify. How about recording video chats, online web conferences or even online education? Well, all you need is some software that can ‘grab’ the video that comes into your computer via the Internet (known as “streaming” video).

In a nutshell, you’ve got two ways to record streaming video: either ‘recording’ or ‘capturing’ it.

Recording is better than capturing because the quality is better, but it doesn’t always work because some broadcasters or other online video service providers block people trying to download their programs in the ‘background’ (but don’t worry, they won’t cut you off from watching the program in your web browser….). For example, the UK’s public service “Channel 4″ is notoriously difficult to record and on occasion, I’ve had trouble with Hulu too.

So when ‘recording’ fails, you can move to ‘capturing’ instead which works 100% of the time and quality is pretty good too. It works by literally capturing what’s on your screen (or just an area of your screen). Once you’ve captured the program, it’s perfectly OK to watch it on your laptop or your TV by connecting your laptop to the TV. There are several pieces of software in the market that can do this but almost all of them can’t record the video frame-rates quickly enough meaning that the end result is jerky video….far from satisfactory.

I thought a simple demo might be helpful, so I put a video together showing both methods (please wait a few seconds…, this is a large video but not too long : 12 mins). In the first section of the video, I show you how I go about ‘recording‘ using the BBC’s iPlayer from the UK as an example and then afterwards (at 6m 37 secs), I do another brief demo of ‘capturing’ from Hulu.

This wonderful piece of software that I used in this demo is called   Replay Capture Suite from Applian Inc.

Over the last couple of years, I tried out various streaming recorders, but I couldn’t find any that would really provide me consistently good performance over several different streaming sites and with good quality. Some recorders were sporadic and managed to grab videos from some sites, whilst from others it didn’t grab anything and then most annoyingly, I experienced several lack-lustre performances with video and sound de-synchronized. Anyway, here are my reasons why I finally settled with Replay Capture Suite (from Applian Inc.)

• It comes with software allowing you to “record” and “capture”.
• When “recording” videos, I can only say that the quality of video and sound is astonishing. Also, when I tested it out versus other competitors, I found Applian’s software to provide the highest success rate across multiple TV station sites world-wide since, like I mentioned above, some sites make it very difficult for you to record from (I’ve personally tested in the US, UK, Spain & Australia).
• The quality of video and sound when “capturing” is also very good (although not quite as high as recording). Some ‘free’ and even paid recorders out there can’t keep up with “frame-rates” that online video produces resulting in jerky video & de-synched sound and, therefore makes for really irritating viewing.
• The bundle comes with software allowing you to edit and convert your videos into other formats. And with the “recording” software ( “Replay Media Catcher“) you get a built-in conversion facility to an impressive 126 different formats including iPad, iPhone, iTunes, MPEG, AVI, etc..
• Applian has dedicated itself to producing media recording software since 1997. They don’t do anything else: they just focus on high quality media software and I think, at very reasonable prices. So this means that Applian are really committed to producing good quality software in just this specific area (and wouldn’t still be in business if it was rubbish).
• The software works perfectly in any version of Windows: I’ve tried and tested the software in XP, Vista and Windows 7 and it works fine.
• Really good customer support & quick to respond.

On the third point I mentioned on capturing, I was really surprised by the quality of video and sound even when grabbing High Definition videos from the BBC iPlayer. Ok, it’s NOT Blu-ray / HD-quality but it’s more than good enough to watch on the TV. And although I’m in the multimedia business myself, I don’t have any special gear in my lounge: my wife would disown me if I did! What I have is a Samsung 60″ HD flat-sceen TV. Yes, it’s a nice TV and yes, I watch captured programs on it and the quality is perfectly acceptable. Another thing I like is the in-built scheduler with Replay Media Catcher (or the ‘recording’ software) so you can program to record live events too…it’s a pity they don’t have something similar with the Replay Video Capture.

I do have a major gripe with the software though which is they don’t do a version for Apple computers. I have no idea why but since I’m not a big Mac user, it doesn’t affect me greatly. There is a way around this though albeit a bit cumbersome: first you install Parallels and then Windows and, according to Applian, their software will work perfectly OK. And although I haven’t tested it myself, an alternative is to try iSkySoft’s iTube Studio for Mac which retails for $29.00. But apart from this omission, the simple fact is that I wanted quality video & sound since it’s really annoying to watch anything unless it’s half-decent.

What also attracted me to Replay Capture Suite was the offer of 7 more pieces of software which are:

1. Replay Converter: allows you to convert video and sound into any number of different formats. When recording video, it typically saves the resultant file in Flash Video format. But with this application you can convert it so you can watch it, for example, on your iPod. Another bonus here is that you can actually rip (or ‘read from’) and burn DVDs.
2. Replay Splitter: this is a simple yet effective video and audio editor. So if you wanted to cut out ads from your recorded program, this software will allow you to do this.
3. Replay Music: this is a very reliable program allowing you to record or download high-quality music directly from your computer or, from online radio stations or subscription-based music sites like Spotify.
4. Replay AV: records from Internet Radio or TV stations and includes a ‘scheduler’ and a built-in ‘converter’. The scheduler is just like your home video: you can program it to record something whilst you’re out.
5. Skype Telecorder: records your Skype video or voice calls. This is really useful if you want to record teleconferences or even private chats.
6. Video Padlock: I really love this simple application. It allows you to ‘lock’ your videos, photos or even other documents with a password (128-bit encyption). Very useful if you’re worried about allowing the kids viewing unsuitable material or simply maintaining your own privacy at home.
7. Replay Director: this is a central ‘control panel’ which allows you to easily navigate to any of the seven applications in the Replay Media Suite with ease.

Replay Capture Suite is priced at $79 which, personally, I think is pretty good value for money. If you think about it, that’s around 60% less than a modern DVD / hard-drive recorder or a ‘media center’ than you buy in the stores these days. And although I have a DVD hard-drive recorder, I hardly use it anymore since I put all my favorite programs on my laptop (I even get requests from my wife!). So your computer becomes the place for documents, photos, music, DVD player and now your own personal video collection too although, rest-assured, I don’t drag the laptop to the TV everyday! It’s just really satisfying to watch something you really fancy whenever you want and not be at the mercy of your Internet connection either (especially when there’s high demand). Another thing which I find really irritating are time-limit restrictions. For example, on the BBC iPlayer website, you have a certain time to watch the program before it expires and disappears from the website so grabbing a high-quality recording overcomes this problem.

But if you have a problem with the $79 price-tag, then I would simply settle on the Replay Media Catcher which sells for $39.95 but bear in mind that you might not be able to grab everything. If you want 100% guaranteed results, then go for for Replay Video Capture which also sells for the same price. The only downside with Replay Video Capture is that the quality isn’t quite as good and you miss out on all the format-conversion facilities that Replay Media Catcher offers. Obviously, if you want the best of both worlds, then just purchase the whole suite because you get all of Applian’s software which collectively would cost you $259.60. I don’t know about about you but I’d much rather save the $180.60 and pay the $79 !

Enjoy! As always, feel free to leave a comment on the main blog page or just email me.

Kind regards,

Andy

p.s. As I mentioned before, Applian offer a 30-day money-back guarantee so if it’s not for you, just ask for your money back!

Page last updated: September 18, 2010

written by Andy \\ tags: streaming recorder review

Once you’ve recorded a video using a streaming recorder, one of the things you’ll probably want to do at some stage is to watch on your TV instead of your computer. After all, you probably don’t want to become completely anti-social with the family…!

So this post is all about how to connect your laptop (or even your standalone) computer to your TV and so, in effect, your computer becomes like an ordinary domestic video recorder / player. The difficulty, however, comes down to the myriad of different types of connectors that exist in laptops and TV’s and this is simply down to the age of the equipment you have.

Before I start explaining the various connection types, I thought it would be useful to provide a little background information (but not too much, I don’t want to overload you with too much techy-talk). Most laptops have something called a VGA socket (a small 3-row, 15-pin  “D” socket located at the back or side of your laptop) which allows you to connect to your laptop to an external monitor. But the signal it emits is NOT compatible with a TV.  A television is just manufactured to receive TV broadcast signals either from a terrestial, satellite or cable antenna. In the US (and Japan), TV stations, satellite or cable providers emit their signals in a special ‘format’ called NTSC. In most of Europe, the system used is called “PAL” (with the exception of France, who use something called “SECAM”). And VGA is not directly compatible with NTSC, PAL or SECAM and, therefore, it has to be converted.

However, more modern TV’s (especially high-definition ones) have something called an HDMI socket (there’s normally more than one). This leads us to the first option. We’ll cover other options afterwards. If both your computer and TV has an HDMI socket, this is, by far, the easiest option. All that’s required is to purchase an HDMI cable, plug each end into the TV and Computer and you’re good to go. Note that HDMI cables transmit both video and sound (including the latest Dolby 7.1 and DTS high definition audio). I would recommend you purchase a longer cable to allow some flexibility in placing your laptop in a convenient location and, that is compatible with the new High Definition 3D TV’s that are making their way into the marketplace. You can get one from Amazon HERE. Using your remote control, remember to change the channel to use the correct HDMI port (depends on how many you have) otherwise you won’t see anything!

But if you have an older TV or laptop, then we have to explore alternative methods. The best way to find the correct approach is to review these steps and options:

1. The first thing you should check is whether the graphics card in your computer is capable of emitting a TV-style signal. If you have a PC, in XP or Vista goto the “Control Panel”, then select “Display” which allows you to change the resolution of your screen. If you’re using Windows 7, it’s highly likely that your laptop has an HDMI port so just follow the instructions I mentioned before. Once there, click on the”Advanced” button and this is where you’ll see several tabs of different options related to your graphics card including an ‘information’ tab. In this ‘information’ tab, it should tell you whether your card can send signals to a TV or not.

2. Your next problem is figuring out which cables you need and / or whether you need a converter box to convert  your computer’s video signals into TV ones. The first place to start is to examine which video ports you have on your computer. Almost all computers have a 3-row, 15-pin VGA socket located at the back or side of the computer & is normally used to connect an external monitor to your laptop. And even some High-Definition TV’s have a VGA port so all you would need is a VGA cable with 15 “male” pins in both ends, connect both ends and you’re done. Note, however, this only transmits video signals, so the sound would still be on the laptop! Back to this in paragraph 4; let’s concentrate on getting the video across first. If your TV doesn’t have a VGA port (unlikely), then the most probable option is that it will have either (a) a RCA or ‘phono’ style sockets or (b) a SCART socket or (c) an ‘S-Video’ socket. An RCA style socket can be identified quite easily: it will be round and will likely have three colors: yellow (this is for video), red (stereo sound, right channel) and white (stereo sound, left channel). A SCART socket is a 21-pin D-style socket more common on European TV’s and, hence often called the “Euroconnecter”. An S-Video socket is simply round and has either 4 or 7-pins.  So our goal here is to connect the VGA port of your computer to one of the three possible options on your TV. In addition, it’s possible that some conversion between a computer and TV signal has to take place so the first thing to do would be to purchase a suitable box. I would recommend the “Sabrent PC to TV Converter Box” which can be purchased from Amazon (US only) or THIS ONE if you’re in the UK or elsewhere. And you’ll also have to purchase the cables seperatly too (you can get them from Amazon too). Note that this option (VGA-to-TV) is compatible with PC’s and Mac’s. The converter box can produce images to a resolution of 1024 x 768 which is fairly reasonable and at least, certainly watchable. If you decide to take this route, make sure you switch everything off (TV, PC, DVD, whatever) before installing the box and cables.

3. There are other options that might be available IF your computer has more than just a VGA port. You might have the round “S-Video” connector (only transmits video, no sound) or possibly, there’ll be something called a DVI (Digital Video Interface) socket but confusingly, there are several different types of DVI. So these combinations complicate things when it comes to purchasing cables. But don’t worry, I’ve found something to help you out! The best thing I’ve found on the web is a site that asks you for your PC and TV (or DVD / Video) connectors and, it gives you list of what you need to purchase. You can click on each item and the site then takes you to a well-known UK electronics store (Maplin). For folks in the US, just take a note of the cables and you’ll find them on Amazon. The site is very easy to use and extremely useful:  http://www.plugpctotv.com .

4. Ok, now let’s move onto getting the sound from the computer to the TV. Remember that options 2 and 3 only covered transferring the video across, not the sound. Thankfully, this is a little simpler. Your laptop should have a small headphone socket or jack which, yes you guessed it, allows you to listen to stuff on your laptop with headphones. So all you need to do is buy a cable that takes sound from this socket and plug the other end into the TV or, via an ‘input’ of your Video or DVD Player / Recorder. The typical cable consists of this small ‘headphone’ plug on one end (plugs into computer) and two ‘phono’ or ‘RCA’ male plugs on the other end, which are normally coded in two colours: red (right stereo) and white (left stereo). These two RCA cables plug into either your ‘input’  sockets on your TV directly or the ‘input’ sockets of your DVD / Video recorder.

5. As I just mentioned, you could plug the sound cables directly into your TV or….you could do this via your existing ‘input’ sockets on your existing DVD or Video recorder. This leads me to the final point. If you’re going to connect the sound to the VCR / DVD recorder, just make sure the video is transferred to the same VCR / DVD recorder. The rule is this: all your ‘input’ cables simple have to be plugged into the same place.

So there you have it: with a little bit of work, you should now be able to hook up your computer to your TV without any problem whatsoever. If you’ve purchased a laptop that’s one or even upto two years old, then it should have an HDMI port and that’s obvsiouly the way to go. And as long as you have one of those rather nice High Definition TV’s, it will also have one or probably several HDMI ports so all you need to do is buy a male-to-male HDMI cable which you can get pretty much anywhere. When you connect the cable, both Mac’s and PC’s automatically “sync” your computer with the TV so everything is done for you (again, make sure you choose the right HDMI ‘channel’ on your TV!).

If you have any questions, just post a comment. Thanks for reading!

Andy

written by Andy \\ tags: hdmi connectivity, streaming recorder on tv, vga to tv connection, watch streaming video on tv

Firstly, may I wish you a warm welcome to my blog. Streaming Recorder is dedicated to helping you understand how you can grab or record streaming video or music to your computer so that you can watch or listen to it without being connected to the Internet and, therefore watch or listen to what you want, whenever you want and even wherever you want.

It seems like we’re connected to the Internet 24 x 7 these days; I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing but one thing I do know is that there are quite a few times when I could do with an Internet connection but simply don’t have it to hand or find it rather expensive. For example, when I’m travelling (happens to me quite a bit), I tend to rack up a heap of expenses on either wireless data connections or WiFi hotel charges. Using techniques and software (which I explain on this site), I must have saved literally hundreds of dollars.

And although broadband back at home is pretty reliable, sometimes I get the occasional problems (especially if the family are on the ‘net as well) watching streaming video. And then there are those video sites which offer programs but, have time limits before it ‘expires’ or gets archived somewhere (the BBC iPlayer is a good example). And what about keeping a collection of those favorite programs on your computer ?….it’s certainly something I like to do…

Of course, it goes without saying that you should be careful here. I only record programs for personal use at home just like the good old days when we had a VCR in the lounge. So piracy or any form of redistribution is a definite no-no. And, personally, if I’m really interested in something passionately, I’ll often just go and buy a copy of the DVD or even, better, Blu-Ray. For example, I have a massive collection of Wildlife documentaries and now with Blu-Ray providing stunning HD quality, I just can’t resist buying it either online or from my local store.

Anyway,  I hope to provide you with really useful and practical advice on how you can record streaming video and audio in a non-techy and no-fuss way. I also plan to provide other useful content related to personal multimedia.

Your comments are welcome anytime. Just leave a reply on the blog post or send me a mail to :  ajtaylormedia@gmail.com

Enjoy!

Andy

written by Andy \\ tags: streaming recorder