Internet Tips: Capture Video Streams Into Files, Then Onto CDs

Save streaming Webcasts to your PC, make AOL Plus go away.

For my 40th birthday, my wife Betsy bought me tickets to see one of my favorite performers--Neil Young--at one of the world's most beautiful venues, Red Rocks Amphitheater just outside Denver. Although late September in the Rockies can be glorious, the weather's unpredictable. This year it snowed, and the unpleasant prospect of sitting in the dark as freezing rain turned to snow outweighed our love for the plaid-clad one.

To diminish my disappointment at missing the show, I started looking around on the Net for some Neil concert footage--and lo and behold, I found a streaming Webcast of the Red Rocks show that Neil & Co. played two days before our snowy date. But who wants to sit in front of the computer watching video play in an itty-bitty on-screen window? Not Betsy. No matter how many times I tried to launch the highest-quality version of the video--a 300-kbps stream--it crapped out after only a few seconds. Never mind that I recently graduated to a blazing-fast cable-modem connection. How could I watch the Webcast video that somebody (Neil, presumably) put online?

I needed to capture that video stream, save it as a file, convert it to MPEG format, burn it to a recordable CD, and pop the disc into my DVD player (most DVD drives can play CD-ROMs formatted according to the Video CD standard). Unfortunately, streaming video is meant to stay that way--you won't find any 'download' or 'save as' links at most of the streaming sites. Even the trick of right-clicking the link and choosing Save Target As (in Internet Explorer) or Save Link As (in Navigator) doesn't work with streaming files. Steve Bass offers a solution to this problem in this month's Home Office column.

You can use Real's RealPlayer 8 Basic to capture audio and video streams in the Real Video (.ram) format and save them on a hard disk in .rm format--if whoever creates the file decides to allow the feature. You have to look pretty hard to find the free Basic version of the player, not the $30 Plus edition, on Real's Web site.