This section contains tips and tricks, howtos and help about useful Windows and Linux software applications.
HiDownload is a Windows program that lets you capture streaming media such as real player movies, real player audio streams and Windows media movies and save them to your computer. It runs on all versions of Windows including 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003. With HiDownload you can capture and save streaming media as individual files downloaded to your computer, …
HiDownload allows you to capture streaming Real video files and Windows Media files and save them to your computer. The streaming video formats that HiDownload supports can be played in Real Player and Windows Media Player.
The example below is from onenews.nzoom.com/onenews_detail/0,1227,246919-1-7,00.html and contains a news article in text format with a link to view a video stream of the news article from the evening’s news broadcast. (The nzoom site no longer exists, hence I have deleted the link to it).
The link to the video file is actually a link to a popup window and we cannot drag and drop this link onto the green HiDownload box as in the audio
example (see Howto save an audio stream for more information). However, HiDownload has an analysis function built-in which monitors web traffic to see what streaming media information is conatained within a file. By enabling this and clicking the popup link, the analysis dialog (shown below) automatically detects the windows media video file contained within the page.
All that needs to be done now is to right-click and select the “Download” option to begin the download. After doing so a dialog like the one below is displayed where we can see the source filename and where to save the downloaded video stream to, as well as the number of threads to download at once. If the video stream has a fixed size, multiple threads allow the stream to be split into several chunks and downloaded all at the same time. At the end the chunks are assembled into one saved video file.
After clicking the “OK” button the download starts and the video stream begins to be saved to our computer. The progress dialog is then available by clicking the “Downloads” button in the main window as shown below.
This progress meter shows each thread being downloaded and the approximate time until the entire video file has been downloaded. Clicking the file in the list displays additional information in the bottom pane.
From this example you can see how easy it is to download a video stream and save it as a file to your computer.
HiDownload is just US$29.95 and can be purchased online using RegNow. Go to the HiDownload website to get a trial version of the software now. The trial version allows you to evaluate the software for 28 days.
Capture streaming audio and video media with HiDownload
How to save audio streams with HiDownload
HiDownload lets you capture streaming audio and save audio files to your computer. The streaming audio formats that HiDownload supports are Real Media files and Windows Media files.
When you start HiDownload a small window appears on top of all other windows. From your web browser you can drag and drop urls that contain streaming audio files onto the window. An example of this is shown below:
The little green box floating above the web page is the HiDownload window where you can drag and drop the streaming media url. The red arrow indicates where you would drag and drop the url to. The page in this example is taken from www.abc.net.au/streaming/default.htm which lists a number of radio stations which have live audio streams broadcasting on the Internet. In this example, the user can select either a Windows Media Player stream or a Real Player audio stream. After you drag the url onto the small green window, HiDownload pops into the foreground and allows you to select further information about where to save the file etc as shown below:
With this dialog window we can specify the source filename and where to save the downloaded audio stream to, as well as the number of threads to download at once. If the audio stream has a fixed size, multiple threads allow the stream to be split into several chunks and downloaded all at the same time. At the end the chunks are assembled into one saved audio file.
Once the file starts downloading you can see the progress in the main window as shown below:
This progress meter shows each thread being downloaded and the approximate time until the entire audio file has been downloaded. Clicking the file in the list displays additional information in the bottom pane. If this is a live audio broadcast stream we are saving then you can stop it at any time and listen to just the part saved. If it has a fixed length then the download will continue until complete (although you can stop it at any time as well and resume at a later time).
From this example you can see how easy it is to download a live broadcast audio stream and save it as a file to your computer.
HiDownload is just US$29.95 and can be purchased online using RegNow. Go to the HiDownload website to get a trial version of the software now. The trial version allows you to evaluate the software for 28 days.
Capture streaming audio and video media with HiDownload
How to save video streams with HiDownload
By default Outlook has a little envelope icon in the system tray; the system tray is where all those little icons are near the clock in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. You can hide it by right-clicking and selecting the "Hide Envelope" icon but this prevents it showing again when new mail arrives. This post looks at how to re-enable the Outlook envelope icon in the system tray.