How to record video streaming

07 Apr 2008 Matteo Mattei linux multimedia mplayer streaming

I often see beautiful streaming videos in a variety kind of formats and some people that are trying to grab those videos without any concrete result. I want to share with you how to capture those streams and convert them in a more usable AVI format.

Well… the only thing to do is open a shell on Linux and check if you have installed mplayer, then run this simple command

$ mplayer "mms://url" -dumpstream -dumpfile video_out.avi

Where:

• mms://url is the URL of the video stream.
• video_out.avi is the output of the recorded video.

That’s all.

Note:
This trick is only available for streams play-ables with mplayer. For sites like Youtube or similar that encode video in flash format, you can’t do it.

Disclaimer: Some sites licenses cannot allow to grab any video. So, please read carefully sites licenses before record any streams.