Greetings,
I am needing to setup my desktop (MacPro) to allow me to capture video off the internet. Occasionally, youtube video or misc. streaming video requires that I record it for professional reasons. Can anyone recommend the best way to do so? I want to be able to capture the highest resolution offered. Sincerely, Joe Ray
If you are interersted in the video, not the rest of the screen, I would not recommend any of the countless screen capture tools that are out there. You can just save the video that is normally streamed to your computer on your hard drive. No quality loss and whatever resolution the video offers.
The easiest way for me to do this was:
1. (Install if you haven't and) start Firefox (that's the easiest with extensions)
2. Get the extension
Video Downloadhelper. You may have to restart Firefox.
3. Go to the page that contains the wanted video.
4. In the menu "Extras" you will now find an entry "DownloadHelper" with the submenu "Media". You'll figure out the rest.
Be aware that this will only work if the content creator and youtube gave you the right to download the video. This is the case for almost all youtube videos and many videos on other sites, but still I want to mention this: Whatever video you get from the internet probably has some sort of license. Be sure to not violate it.
If the video is allowed to be streamed on mobile devices, you will be able to get an .mp4 file which you can directly import into most editing programs. If not, you will have to go with the Flashplayer Video (.flv) format. If your software complains, try to just change the container to .mp4 or something else (not the stream and codec), for example with
this little tool I wrote. It won't affect the quality and will be pretty fast (since there is no re-encoding).
