Do they make a USB capture box to record Web Cam video from a Notebook?

I’ve been getting very frustrated trying to record my Skype music lessons using Pamela. Last week the Skype connection dropped and we restarted Skype too quickly. Pamela was still busy writing out the recording and didn’t start recording again. I lost the last 20 mins of a one hour lesson. This week I failed to notice a Skype prompt asking if I wanted to allow Pamela to access the Skype API. I lost my entire hour’s music lesson with no recording. This is some serious money I’m losing to this stupidity.

Do they make a simple USB hardware recorder? Something that would just plug into the Notebook and record the web cam and audio? Searching for USB recorder finds stuff that records VCR’s or DVD players to the pc. **That’s the wrong direction! ** I want to capture a PC window and audio to an external recording device.

As a last resort for a audio backup I’m going to start using my 15 year old Olympus digital recorder. Just lay the damn thing on the counter top and record through the microphone. It’s pathetic that I have to result to this, but I’m desperate.

You’d think something as critical as recording a business related Skype session would be easy. I’ve been amazed at how many ways the Pamela software has failed me. Skype makes it even more error prone with that stupid prompt authorizing Pamela to access the API. It’s just a mess.

Is there any hardware solution to record video and audio from a PC using USB?

Even recording with a Cassette recorder won’t work because the stupid PC turns off its internal speaker when I plug into the Speaker out jack. Even a cassette recorder won’t work with these retarded computers. Recording using the cassette recorder or my old digital recorder’s internal mic is horrible. All kinds of noises, clicks, breathing etc.

There’s no such thing as a “pure hardware solution” to anything driven by software.

There’s software that reads the webcam, that listens to the microphone, that formats the information into a hard drive recording (Pamela, in your case). And software that coordinates all the data flow among all of those pieces.

None of this is hard-wired like the jacks of a casette recorder, to use your analogy. Hence, a USB plug-in doesn’t have any particular advantage, other (perhaps) than its embedded software being less buggy or error-prone than Pamela. But if Skype makes you answer a prompt or do weird permission/activation dances to record with Pamela, I don’t think the software embedded in a USB device would be able to bypass that.

YMMV. I don’t do any of that stuff, so I don’t know for concrete certain. But I know the architectures of modern computer systems, and it’s pretty much software all the way down. Therefore, you can do whatever the software lets you do. And if some of that is Skype, you can safely guess what kinds of limitations come with it.

ETA: This is all on the presumption that you’re being literal and absolute about the idea of a USB device. I’ll post more on another solution set, but in a different post so that I’m not up against the edit window.

I do have a Peavey adapter that lets me plug my Guitar into the PC through USB. It also works in the reverse direction. USB audio gets converted to analog. I’m pretty sure that I can use the line out jack on the Peavey adapter to plug in my Olympics digital recorder.
http://peavey.com/products/index.cfm/item/1118/117951/XPort

You’re right. There’s always software. The Peavey requires a driver to work. To record my guitar playing I need software like Audacity.

It’s just bizarre to need old tech like a pocket recorder. I haven’t used this Olympics recorder since my college days recording lectures.

The alternate approach is to put a box into the path between your computer and your monitor. As well as the audio path between your computer and speakers.

The simplest approach is if your computer had HDMI output and your monitor is HDMI input. There are little video capture boxes that plug in between the computer and monitor and then write the information back through a USB interface to the computer. Since HDMI carries sound as well, this means that the capture box would include the audio channels in the video capture files.

The pre-made solutions I’ve seen depend on using HDMI as the video/audio path. This is because HDMI is a combined video/audio data path, the data is already all digitized in a video-capture friendly format, and very high-speed. As well as prevalent in modern hardware. (Almost any modern computer has HDMI output, and almost every modern monitor or flatscreen TV has HDMI input.)

Since we don’t know much about your computer, it’s hard to know whether this solution can be applicable.

USB is probably the wrong choice, as it takes non-standard software to output a computer’s display+audio through USB.

Perhaps a video recorder with HDMI input, like this, would work. But you’ll need to make sure the display is mirrored, and I’m not sure how you’d handle the audio. You may be able to connect this inline with your monitor (i.e between your computer and monitor); that way it should record everything you’re seeing on that monitor.