Recording streaming video

We often find that clients need to record streaming video sessions - perhaps from CCTV cameras or even off YouTube and other services. Often the easiest way to achive this is via  browser based plugin for capturing video such as the Ant.com plugin for Firefox but sometimes somethign more ;heavyweight' is required.

Tubedigger - see http://www.tubedigger.com/index.html - is a low cost - 20 Euro grabber which works with YouTube and many streaming video sites, but does not, as yet, work with some of the latest encryption techniques and so will fail on occasions.

If one really needs to grab a copy of such an encrypted steam then the final resort would be a screen grabber tool, such as the excellent - and totally free - Any Video Recorder which can be found at  http://www.any-video-converter.com/

This literally grabs a section of the monitor screen, along with audio and encodes it as MPEG4 suitable for replay on most devices. It works well, and produces good quality files. It does require a reasonably powerful PC - 2Ghz, clock - and a few gb of free disk space and when it is running it's probably best to leave the PC alone or one might inadvertently drag a new window into the recording area which would then be stored in the video file!

In practise it works well and is highly recommended.