Recording a non-downloadable video

Hi.
I would want to write a little program that can record a video wich is been played on another window.
It can be useful , for example, for storing on the hard disk some videos that can be only watched on internet pages, but can not be donwloaded or you can not determine the url from wich they come.

I found some programs that can do this (screen recording), but they are not freeware.... but if they exist, i think doing this is possible.

How can i do this under windows?
thank you.. sorry for the so difficult topic :D

If your web browser can display a web page, then you can download it yourself manually. I can't think of any situation that you cannot.

You might have to look at the source code for the web page to figure out exactly what the URL is. Or you might have to download the entire page and associated files. But it can almost certainly be done.

The GNU program wget is very useful for downloading a page and every page that page links to. You should try it out. It's command-line.

If you really want to record the screen like this, there are plenty of freeware programs that do it. Taksi comes to mind.

But beware that these programs usually have a very low FPS rate, because otherwise they eat tons of CPU and disk space.

First thing is to determine how the vid is being played on the other window. What type of vid is it? Rm swf avi wmv mpeg or streaming vid? Does it stream or download then play? More info. meow. One thing I ran in to is ‘file in use by another prog’ so it can not be copied as it downloads. Even if I own the original vid! Youbube.com changed their format so videodownloader no longer works. <whine> So using a player that will allow you to ‘save vid as’ is what you are looking for.

Also what compiler?

the video comes from a file on the web, not a live stream, and it is a flash video.
while the video is been downloaded, the flash player starts play it before it has been downloaded completely.

ok thanks, i'll try wget and taksi.. but does wget downloads all the files linked to the page, even if they are not web pages? for example, videos referred in an
<object> tag.?

if the methods above don't work, i could try a crazy thing,using the WINAPI :)
given the handle to the window in which the video is in reproduction, i could do a window capture and save it onto a bitmap file, 25 times per second.
the screen capture can be done with the GetDIBits function.

then i merge all the bitmaps in a flash video file with 25 frames per second... using Flash MX..
sounds crazy, uh? :)

That might work. meow. Or you could try to hook the stream as it downloads. dup the data in to another file.swf then view it.

Wouldn't the file be saved to temp internet files?

What I have found is that it down loads to the ‘temp’ file folder. As fl.......... then two numbers. But it deletes it when it is finished or the page is closed.

Doc settings/ admin/ local settings/ temp .... you should note that ‘temp internet file’ folder is also next to the ‘temp’ file folder.

if it is the same as i think. a link to the vid would be clearer.

There's already internet apps that do this for you... such as keepvid. If you wanted to write your own app to do this that's perfectly fine, just thought I'd point that out.

Note that some video players use overlay layers, so if you "copy the entire screen", the video is actually just a blue/pink/purple rectangle, because the overaly is composited by the graphics processor later on, and the "screen content" doesn't have the video content.

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Mats