Can You Download Streaming Video?

by Nick Smith,
Publisher of CamStudio: Streaming Video Software

Many people may think that they can download streaming video clips using their browser, but unfortunately, this is not possible. Streaming video is not a medium. Rather, the medium is the video, but the method of how the video is offered to the general public is streaming.

Streaming is something that is constantly being offered or played for anyone to view. Television stations that are on twenty four hours a day are streaming. Just because you turn your television on during the day does not mean you are recording, or downloading, the video. That is how streaming video works, and why the ability to download streaming video does not work.

Many people are disappointed when they learn this, especially since there are so many places that have streaming videos for you to watch. Sometimes, these websites will charge you every time you want to watch these types of videos, which is unfair to say the least.

There are software programs and website tools that will allow you to capture, intercept and download streaming video files.

For instance, if I want to download videos from one of the popular online video websites, like YouTube, Google Video, MSN Soapbox, MySpace, Yahoo Movies and so on, I use Splandoo.

You just go to the website, select the video website from the drop down menu on the right, paste the video URL into the textfield and click the Download button - Easy!

Once you've submitted the video URL, if it's one of the formats it supports, it will give you a download link for the video in either FLV or AVI format which you can then download to your local machine and play with the media player of your choice.

You might have to add the .FLV or .AVI extension to the filename before you start downloading, but that's the only tricky bit you need to do.

It starts getting tricky when you want to download other streaming video formats, like Real, Quicktime, Windows Media and so on.

It is possible for CamStudio to record a streaming video in these formats, but this isn't what is was designed to do and the results can be ... ah ... interesting!

You are better off using one of the dedicated 3rd party programs that have been specifically designed to capture and record streaming video. The one I personally use and recommend is Replay A-V. It will pretty much record any video or audio you'll ever need (including podcasts and vidcasts) and you can test it out by downloading the trial version from their site.

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