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Sep 07
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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
