Amazon anytime storage8/13/2023 ![]() PlayLater has positioned itself as a DVR for online streams, which should be perfectly legal. If all of that sounds too good to be true-or legal-don’t worry: Thanks to a 2010 ruling that protects the consumer’s right to watch “time-shifted” media (the same one that makes recording streams yourself legal), the service should be protected. For paid services such as Amazon Prime or Netflix, you’ll need to enter your login information once you do, PlayLater presents an easy-to-use interface for finding streaming video and saving it to your computer as fast as you can stream it. Paying $20 a year, or $40 for a lifetime subscription, allows you to use the PlayLater service and search for any stream on any service to which you legally have access. ![]() It delivers an MP4 file after the stream ends, without interrupting your other computing tasks. PlayLater is a new service that lets you queue up your accessible streaming media and records it for you in the background. You can save some time and hassle by automating your streaming media recording completely. I eventually managed to record a stream using Audials on all three of the major streaming services, and you could do the same thing with Twitch, YouTube, or any other online video service. Since you’re merely recording the video that’s playing on your screen, you can use this trick with any streaming service. Screen recording has other advantages as well. Getting the file size to reasonable levels (less than 1GB for an hour-long program) took very little tweaking. With most streams in my tests, the procedure was as easy as entering a URL and then letting the program open a new tab to begin recording. Although screen-capturing with Audials, a $25 program, is still a system-intensive task that leaves you with gigantic files, paying for the software unlocks a lot of settings and presets. That said, such problems become easier to deal with if you upgrade from free to paid software. Inexpensive screen-recording programs such as Audials give you the power to record and store anything you can play on your PC screen. You’ll need to experiment to figure out the optimal balance of recording size and quality for you and your available storage. For example, before I tweaked all the settings in CamStudio, my sample videos exceeded 200MB for just 30 seconds of footage. Second, the files produced when you perform screen capturing are typically huge. Often your recordings can contain a lot of skipped frames if you’re trying to capture video at a fairly high resolution, especially on older computers that have their hands full just streaming full-screen video in the first place. First, it’s a demanding task that will tax your PC’s hardware. Recording the video yourself does come with a few caveats. Plenty of programs, including free options such as CamStudio, will let you record both the audio and the video from your computer screen as it plays. In fact, the only reliable method I could find to get a copy of a Netflix stream was to record it from the screen. Be warned, though: Setup can be somewhat finicky, and the documentation is a little technical. RTMPDumpHelper will walk you through the process of establishing a proxy server that will intercept any RTMP streams (including those for Hulu and several smaller video-streaming sites) and save them as an MP4 file. Your experience may differ on Linux, but on Windows you can simply download RTMPDumpHelper and the RTMPDump Toolkit, unzip both into one folder, and then open the RTMPDumpHelper program. Viewers who want to record streaming movies and TV for later enjoyment should try RTMPDumpHelper, a free utility designed to download media that you’re streaming via RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol, which Hulu uses). Hulu doesn’t provide an official download option. Fortunately, as I’ll discuss later, some unsanctioned third-party alternatives can give you considerably more control over your streamed media. Amazon’s official solution to the offline-viewing problem is a bit of a wash. The user experience was unpleasant, and offered no added convenience compared with watching video in my browser or through iTunes. A half hour and several rounds of quitting out of the program and refreshing my recent purchases later, the film finally showed up in Unbox for offline viewing. I rented a movie on Amazon to test whether Unbox could indeed download files for later. If you want to do that, you’ll have to turn to some unorthodox third-party alternatives. ![]() Amazon’s Unbox player is great for downloading digital copies of movies and TV shows you’ve purchased on Amazon, but you can’t use it to save streaming Instant Video for later. ![]()
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