How to Capture ABC iView content
Also How to record ABC iView content or How to save ABC iView content.
EDIT: 8/4/2011: http://users.on.net/~m.elliott/ivn/index.html has the latest iViewnNapper.
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There are two ways I know work that you can do this.
1 – Using a Video Recorder / DVD Recorder
If you have a laptop, you can probably connect it to your DVD recorder or VCR using an SVIDEO cable plus a headphone to two RCA plug cable.
You then need to configure your laptop to output through the SVIDEO connector which varies from laptop to laptop.
This uses what is known these days as the ‘analogue’ hole which generally can be expressed as ‘if you can see it you can copy it, if you can hear it you can copy it.’
This is one step up from plonking a video camera in front of your laptop 🙂
The analogue hole is very slowly being eroded with new technology but it will always be with us one way or another – in the worst case with a video camera in front of a TV and the audio captured from a headphone socket. (For best results set white balance and exposure manually.)
2 – Replay Media Catcher.
This second option does not always work, but it works most of the time. The important thing with this is that you don’t start playback before you’ve set Replay Media Catcher to record, because otherwise you won’t be able to capture the show (unless you open a different browser or nuke cookies or something.) Try first using a cartoon or something interesting like Media Watch before going for the show you’re after.
RMC is not free sadly, but you can try it out. Note also that it seems to be a bit temperamental in virtual machines. You can trial it however but it will only capture the first 75% of the show in trial mode. http://www.applian.com/
I’ve tried a few other applications but have not had any success. For example, applications that capture Flash URLs don’t work with iView as it either obscures the URLs with script, or perhaps just doesn’t work that way.
Setting the option “Web Stream Dumper” may help, but I haven’t really tested this as this entire write-up happened because I had two different PVR applications fail at the same time on a show I wanted. (One, GB-PVR just didn’t bother to record at all; and the other WinFast PVR didn’t capture the audio.)
Oh, and remember that many of the shows are available for podcast download anyway; but there are some shows that they don’t put out that way for whatever reasons the producer of the content dreams up. Naturally, the best shows like Spicks and Specks don’t appear online anywhere except for the occasional torrent site when someone is brave or smart enough to upload it without getting done like a dinner. Sadly it’s not popular enough to turn up on such sites regularly so if you miss it, you’re prolly stuffed.
Applian also have another video recording product I have not tried, but which may also work.
Good Luck!