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Record the Unrecordable

To capture a Real stream for offline viewing, choose Play, Record Audio or Play, Record Video, or right-click the audio or video clip and choose the record command from the pop-up menu. Don't get your hopes up, though. After several hours of browsing, I found precious few clips that had a selective-record feature enabled. One potential solution is Streambox's Streambox VCR, but it is temporarily unavailable. When it reappears, it may include the ability to capture Real streaming content.

Microsoft doesn't offer a capture option for the .asf, .wma, and .wmv files its Windows Media Player streams (or for their respective .asx, .wmx, and .wmv redirector files that point to Windows Media files elsewhere on the server). But thanks to an anonymous German programmer, you may have better luck capturing Windows Media streams than Real content. The free, open-source ASFRecorder (available from our Downloads library) intercepts incoming Windows Media streams and saves them as files. For more information about the recorder, check the creator's Web site.

To use ASFRecorder, you must know the address of the streaming file that you want to capture. Some sites, like Barbra Streisand's, make capturing a streaming file pretty easy: Just right-click the streaming link you want to capture and choose Copy Shortcut in Internet Explorer or Copy Link Location in Navigator; then choose File, Open URL in ASFRecorder, and paste the link into the Open field. Not all streaming files are this easy to track down, though. The program's voluminous readme file (choose Help, Show Readme-File) offers extensive tips for identifying streaming-file addresses that are cloaked by server scripting or other devices intended to keep streams beyond our control.

Once the file is on your hard disk, you can burn it to a Video CD, which you can then watch on either a computer or a TV using most any DVD player. Video file-format conversion and CD-burning tricks are beyond the scope of this column, but you'll find instructions for just about any conceivable task at the authoritative VCD Help Web site.