As part of my dayjob, I’ve recently been learning more about QuickTime streaming video than I thought I’d ever want to know, but this has paid off with a solution to what has been a long-time frustration: saving streaming audio and video signals locally.
The solution turns out to be an elegant peice of open source software called VideoLan or the VLC Media Player. This is a project begun by students at a technical university in Paris, but which is now an online collaborative community like Audicity or Mozilla.
VLC is multiheaded. It can play steeaming audio or video in many formats, transcode them on the fly into other formats, and then save them locally or serve them up to a network or the internet.
The part I’m interested in is its ability to–like quicktime, real audio or the windows media player–play a streamed video from an internet URL but without their restrictions on recompiling and saving the packets of data. VLC will happily ignore QuickTime’s ‘disable local save’ flag, for instance.
With the VLC media player installed, capturing a data stream could hardly be easier: I run a wizard, paste the URL of the stream I want to play or capture into a textbox, check off a few formatting preference questions, supply a filename and path that I want the copy to be saved under, and click “next”.
And that’s it; I know have a copy of the source file.
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I tried it out with a track from The Rambles of Kitty, a Comhaltas website containing MP3s of a long out of print LP. I was particularly interested in track 16, a song called Mary on the Banks of the Lee, because this is the song version of an air I learned years and years ago from a recording of philadelphia flute player Richard Hughes. He played it as an air under the name “the Banks of the Lee”. I don’t know anyone else who plays it. I liked it enough that I learned it from the record when I was first learning to play the flute.
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Here’s how VLC worked:
Going to the page I had bookmarked, I clicked on the link to the track I want to capture, and then clicked on the “download audio” link. This pops up my browser’s quicktime plug-in, which plays the track. I put quicktime on pause, and then copied the URL (blahblah.mp3) to my clipboard. I closed the quicktime window.
Opening VLC, I then started up the capture wizard, checked the “stream/copy to file” option, pasted the copied url into the appropriate box, and assigned it a filename in the my_documents folder, and hit "next’. There are a couple of other options concerning the format I wanted it saved in. I checked “MP3” and “raw” because I want the source file as is.
Finishing the wizard, I ran it, playing the track, and then checked my docs–and there’s the mp3 file: voila!
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This looks like a great way to save streamed RTE radio programs for playing on my iPod during my commute, for example. Or anything else, actually. It’s a useful program,. I’ve been looking for something like it for a long while.
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It also has a feature in which you can program in a playlist of files or URLs which it will play in sequence as specified. I think with not much tinkering, I could set it to record specified URLs at specified times, enabling me to program it to listed to and record shows in my absense.
Thanks for sharing