Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Question:  "How do I capture/record a streaming video that’s done using Macromedia Flash?"

 

This is the question that many people have asked me in some form or another, the most common format of this question is, "How do I capture a video from <website>.com… because I’ve searched my Internet Cache for the .SWF file or the .FLV file and I’ve come up with nothing?"   Some online video sites now use the less efficient & less capable Macromedia Flash format for delivering video content and up ’til now, Flash Video has been so minimally used that there have been virtually no tools for the end user to use to record the video and its associated audio.

 

Tonight I just decided to just hash it out and write a quick tutorial on how to record any Flash video you see on the Internet into a Windows Media .WMV file that you can then save and archive for your own offline playback. 

 

(Note the following was done on a 2.0Ghz Pentium M laptop in a hotel room Internet connection

 

1) DOWNLOAD REPLAY SCREENCAST ($19)

Replay Screencast is a low resource video capture program that records both the 30 fps full color video you’re seeing on the screen as well the stereo audio being sent to your speakers.  And please don’t pirate it – pay for it.  Applian, the company that makes the product deserves your patronage.

 

2) CONFIGURE AUDIO/VIDEO SETTINGS

Set the "Audio device" to the audio adapter on your machine.  

Set the "Audio recording line" to the channel that the audio is outputting to – usually "Wave Out Mix" or something like that. 

Set the Video frames per second to 30 and the bit rate to 750KBps.  This isn’t at all optimal but heck, all we want is a file right now right?  We can tweak this later for file size and bandwidth consumption but for right now, let’s just make sure we get the content. 

Set the "Smoothness" to 50 and select the "High Motion Video" radio button.

 

3) SET VIDEO RECORDING REGION

This is where it get’s a little tricky.  Basically, you need to open up the window in which you plan to playback the video in question.  For example, if you were to go to say, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6905089586228877019&q=sushi, you can initiate playback and press the pause button.  (This is actually good because the video will buffer in the background while you are doing other things.)

Now back on the Screencast Setting menu, set the "Video Recording Region" to the "Screen Region" radio button. 

Now, click the crosshairs that you see next to the words, "Screen Region".  Your mouse will turn into the cross hairs… move the crosshairs to the upper left hand corner of the video window in your browser and click the LEFT mouse button. 

Now drag the mouse to the bottom left hand corner of the video you wish to capture (a rubber band will appear) and click the RIGHT mouse button.

You should see that the values for "Top left" and "Bottom right" are now filled in on the Screencast Settings dialog box.

Click the OK button to close the Settings window – you’re done.

 

4) RECORD VIDEO

Press "Record" in the Screencast window.

Click the browser window that has the video in question and start the video by either pressing PLAY or UNPAUSING the video.  Stay in the context of the browser to maximize foreground performance.

When the video is done, press STOP in the Screencast window.

 

…you’re done.  You should have a file labeled something like "Replay Screencast 2006-01-09-02.49.wmv" in your recordings folder with a brand new recording of the Flash that was streamed to you.  The file is a full digital fidelity encoding that is streamable from a Windows Media Server and/or playable offline from your own PC.

 

I’ve found that this tool and method produces excellent results as long as the video capture window doesn’t exceed 800×600 (which you really shouldn’t have to do anyway) and this is just because of the required processing overhead of running both the Windows Media libraries as well as Flash Player.  A good rule of thumb is to make sure that the Flash video is playing back in the original dimensions it was recorded in.  (Since you can’t get any better fidelity than that) 

 

To do this in in some players:

– Click the Down arrow

– Select "Original Size"

 That’s it.