Save streaming media to disk Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 8/25/2005 08:38:00 PM

Have you ever needed to watch a streaming video and been ex-stream-ly (haha) annoyed at the brain numbing pause you get when you skip forward or back? You see the every time you change position in the file your viewing software stops the transmission and begins buffering the section you skipped to. It can be very annoying and potentially damaging to your fist (if you're like me and tend to punch your screen). Well, all this can be avoided if you simply download the video to your hard drive. Unfortunately, downloading streaming media is disallowed. This is usually done to avoid bandwidth issues (keeps the flow rate nice and slow for the server) or so that the content provider can control the content. Often times it seams to be just annoy us. However, there is a solution. You can download SDP Multimedia's SDP downloader. SDP downloader enables saving of streaming media over MMS, MMST, MMSU and HTTP streams. With this software you can simply enter a url of the streaming media and choose a location on your disk to save the media file and let it fly. What this software is actually doing is streaming the media from the website and re-recording it to a video file on your HD for viewing at your leisure. Don't be surprised that it will take 60 mins to download that 60 min video.

I have only two criticisms of the application. I think the GUI needs some work. It is a little difficulty to figure out at first. The more critical draw back I see is with the batch downloading mode. You see in this mode the SDP downloader is supposed to download multiple streams in sequence. Unfortunately to get this to work you need to create a asx play list. This cased me to have to search the web for several minutes to find the asx protocol and the create the play list. Why not make the play list directly in SDP downloader, or better yet simply have a grid where users can enter multiple files. But in the end these minor criticisms don't come close to the pain and suffering this application has saved me. They got my $20.

wiki: SDP Multimedia

Edit: Also a "Shut down Windows when finished" option would be really great.