Craig Crossman photo Craig Crossman
National Newspaper Computer Columnist

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CAPTURE EVERYTHING YOUR COMPUTER SEES AND HEARS

Something is playing on your computer yet you can't save it to disc so you can play it again anytime you like. It's a frustrating experience when you see something playing on your computer and yet you can't truly own it. When you have something saved to your hard drive, you don't have to worry about the streaming video becoming unavailable later on. The ability to capture media to disc insures you will always have it available to you. But unfortunately too many online resources that offer up streaming video and audio such as YouTube and Hulu offer no way to save their content to your hard drive. As long as these sites offer their content, you can watch it. But when they're gone, they're gone. It would really be nice to have the ability to save these media streams to disc and fortunately Applian Technologies offers a product that lets you do exactly that.

Replay Media Capture is a streaming video and audio downloader that lets you capture an exact digital copy of what you are seeing and hearing to your computer's hard disk drive. This is not to be confused with similar products that screen capture what is being displayed on your computer's monitor. In fact, Applian actually does offer a media screen capture product called Replay Video Capture that copies the digital information within your computer's video memory. But Replay Media Capture works in a totally different way.

When you watch a YouTube video for example, a server at the other end begins to deliver the digital information to your computer. According to Applian, their Replay Media Catcher is able to access those servers and intercept the live stream directly. This process allows you to make an exact digital copy of the streaming media unlike screen capture products that usually yield a capture result that's inferior in quality to the original stream.

According to Applian, Replay Media Capture supports more streaming protocols than any other media capture programs and they continue to expand the number of supported websites that deliver various types of streaming media. Applian's website maintains a listing of hundreds of currently supported media streaming website locations. Check it out to see if what you want to capture is on a supported website service.

Once captured, Replay Media Capture stores the media data as an FLV file that can be watched on the included media player. If you want to convert these files into other formats, Replay Media Capture offers conversion to most of the popular media formats such as WMV, MPEG, MP3, MP4 and 3GP. A special included converter lets you modify these files so that they can be played on an iPod and iPhone. If there's embedded naming information within the streaming data, Replay Media Capture will automatically name and tag the files for you.

Recording takes place in real time so plan to spend some time when using Replay Media Capture. If you know in advance what you wish to record, you can begin the viewing process and work on something else or just go away until the download is complete. Replay Media Capture has the ability to capture several media streams simultaneously making the unattended capture process even easier.

So if you've ever watched something on your computer and have it disappear from the website on which you viewed it, now you can capture what you see and hear to your hard disk to be played whenever you like, even without an Internet connection. Replay Media Capture sells for $39.95 and is available only for Windows.

www.applian.com

 

Craig Crossman is a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern time.  Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com

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