Long story short: I am doing a two hour lecture on crisis intervention for my class next week. I’d like to start out with a clip showing what it is not. I’ve found two really great, class appropriate, clips on the Internet, but can not figure out how to save them to my computer. I can’t just play them from the 'net because the classroom does not have Internet access. It does have a hookup to play something off of the computer directly, however.
Unfortuntately you’ll need to buy a program to do that. (Or at least, I am unaware of any free software that will do this)
One such program is WMRecorder. It has several modes of operation depending on how the movie is streamed in the first place, but in general works pretty well most of the time. (I have encountered a few streams it couldn’t detect and therefore wouldn’t record) Download the demo and try it out, see if it works on the streams you’re after.
The only caveat is that recorded streams will be of poorer quality than the originals due to the fact that you’re capturing the uncompressed stream of compressed, lossy video and audio and subsequently re-compressing it, resulting in even lossier video and audio. (This is especally noticeable in the quality of the audio, which can end up sounding tinny and attenuated if the original stream is pretty heavily compressed in the first place)
Some methods are a shareware (15 days free) program called “Save Flash” there are also programs to convert .swf to .avi if that is something you are looking for. I have seen a few of them being freeware.
Sometimes you can find the video file in your browser cache folder. It probably doesn’t have the correct extension, but you can look for recent files larger than a megabyte. I think the first file is in Shockwave format and you might need to rename it with a .swf extension. The second file that’s hosted by YouTube requires a different player. I think it’s an FLV player. You can find players for that format on the web.
And now I have another member who says that it’s allowable to copy and use copyrighted material if for an academic purpose. I hope I’m representing his position correctly.
This one is being sent around the mod loop. Sorry if it takes a while.
It’s probably legal, what the OP is doing. Asking the original copyright holders is probably a good thing, but the academic nature probably would fly.
Because the info that is provided here and would be continued to be provided and improved on would allow others to use the technique for copying that is not legal would not be a good thing.