Adobe / Macromedia Flash Capture

Flash stream recorders that support both RTMP and HTTP protocols:

• Replay Media Catcher
• Orbit Downloader - Free Software, No Spyware Detected
• WM Recorder
• FLV Recorder

Orbit Downloader is free and seems to work with some tweaking. There is a learning curve with this application. The following steps were used to capture a video from a commercial web site.

Use Grab++ a feature of Orbit Downloader to monitor a video being played on the web browser though Flash.

Sometimes the swf file is a code to launch another media like a flv file. On some commercial sites the flv files are hidden/protected so they may be difficult to track down and identify. The Grab++ program sniffs what is going on with the web browser when it plays a video via Flash. You will see all of the files being streamed to your browser. The big file is typically the video.

In our experiment a swf file launched another swf file which represented a custom video player interface. It also launched a streaming flv file. None of this could be detected with the browser and Flash player alone. Grab++ displayed everything being downloaded.

Once the flv file was downloaded it seemed to refuse to play in the Adobe Flash player.

To play flv files that will not play in Adobe Flash Player we used VLC Player version .9.8a. VLC Player opened and played both the audio and video of the flv file. Older versions of VLC only played the audio. If the video is missing it doesn't mean your flv file is incomplete. It probably indicates the flv file version is too new for your version of VLC player to decode. So far VLC Player version .9.8a has successfully decoded and played both audio and video for the flv files we have tested.

• VLC media player (VideoLAN) - Free Software, No Spyware Detected

Orbit Downloader (Free)

Orbit downloader can capture Youtube video being played with practically any web browser. However, a special feature of Orbit Downloader is a plugin that allows user to click button over the video and capture from the browser window without having to use Grab++. It is faster and easier to grab a video from sites like Youtube with the browser integration. Unfortunately, we could not get the integration to work with Opera and Firefox even though Orbit web site claims it will work. It only worked for us with Internet Explorer. We tested it with MSIE version 6.x.

YouTube Downloader (Free)

Much easier to use than orbit downloader in some ways. However, will not always download the YouTube video. Some videos are protected in a way that causes YouTube Downloader to fail. We tested YouTube downloader version 2.1.x

• YouTube Downloader - Free Software, No Spyware Detected

YouTube downloader does something that Orbit downloader will not do. It converts the Flash files into standard video media types like MPEG-4 avi. However, this requires the codec to be installed already on PC and process actually re-encoded video so some quality is lost. The only way to convert flv file to avi is to re-encode and thus quality is sacrificed.

Analog Hole

With a video capture card you can capture any video output being displayed on a PC. Video may be streamed using S-Video out on PC video card with that feature and captured with another device. Re-encoding and quality loss occurs. Process requires additional hardware. Process will capture ANY video that PC can play. Always works, but slow, complicated, and quality loss.