15-Minute Reviews :: Web Stream Recorder Pro v2.0.0.539

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Web Stream Recorder Pro version 2.0.0.539 by Sytexis Software – An application to specifically grab audio and video streams right from your network connection.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Web Stream Recorder Pro, as the name implies, is a network utility (Internet and LAN) that captures and records streams of video and audio data that is being transferred. The tool is frequently used to record live video and audio broadcasts, ‘teleseminars’ or net radio shows. More over, the tool is simply indispensable for situations when the source URL is unknown or is being deliberately obfuscated.

Web Stream Recorder Pro is capable of capturing Windows Media Audio/Video streams (ASF, WMA, WMV, WMX, NSC, WAX), Shoutcast/IceCast streams (MP3 files), GoogleVideo, YouTube and others.”

Quick Pros

• Works by monitoring network as opposed to being browser-specific
• Interface works but is not nice to look at
• Grabs many sites’ FLV files besides YouTube and Google
• Windows media files I tried all worked well

Quick Cons

• Application crashed when starting a Shoutcast station
• Many times will attempt to launch two recordings of same video
• While could not test, does not appear to have stream splitter
• Supported formats really could expand

Expansion

While there are dozens of video grabbing tools out there, this one offers a little different twist to many other video grabbers out there. This application offers the ability to grab its media not by incorporating into a web browser or other application, or being a stand-alone application, but by using WinPcap to monitor the network for eligible streams coming past it. This offers the unique ability to be browser-independent and even application-independent.

This application, while it is dead-easy to use, is definitely not anything to look at. The main window has 3 buttons and a small log window. The first button is used to be able to open the second window for Current Recordings, Recording History and the Scheduler, which in themselves look a little better, but still is not anything great; They do have their own issues as well; Scrolling left-right will quite often cause streaking which will usually only be fixed by scrolling up and down. The Recording History seems to be a bit redundant, because I’ve recorded a fair amount of content while testing through quite a few launches, and it seems to be only saving from the most recent launch, though this could be due to some of the odd bugs I’ve stumbled into as well. The next button over is the Options button, and most of the settings are very basic. I do feel that the Save to folder and Enable auto recordings settings should have been right on the main window or at least the Current Recordings window for quick changes to the settings however; With this process, it is 4 clicks to turn auto recording on or off, instead of a single-click if it were put right in the two windows. The last button is the typical Help button, with a How Do I… and Quick Tour option, plus the other usual options as well.

My first testing was by launching WinAMP and heading straight to Streamcasts. I kept in mind that the application only can do MP3-based files, so I found an audio stream that was MP3, and upon launching, Web Stream Recorder Pro instantly crashed after popping up the ‘Found Stream’ bubble on the system tray. I tried a few other MP3 streams (Quite a few), all with the same result. I disabled autostart feature and tried again; This time, I did not auto-crash, but as soon as I attempted to start recording a Shoutcast stream, the application went down. I tried testing a few other aspects after this as well; While the application description states MP3 streams only, it does not appear to distinguish AAC+ or any of the video streams and instead tries to start recording them as well, crashing the application just as with MP3s.

My testing of the FLV and Windows Media went a little better however. Flash recording went well for the most part, ripping out the FLV file from many media sites including but not limited to YouTube and Google Video. The biggest issue I did have with FLV recording is quite often the application seems to detect two streams at once on some of the alternate sites; The first one to start recording would record successfully, the second would fail because it can’t write to the file recording by the other thread which is okay, but when you see the error message balloon pop up, you see that it fails, then you get the complete message, which is confusing – I just learned to ignore it after a while, and just remove the dead record threads after a while. Besides this issue, every video I tried to capture from various sites did work. My Windows Media video and audio testing went smooth; I did not bump into the dual-record issue once the entire time testing (It’s getting harder to find embedded Windows Media content on the net it seems) and the record quality was always nice. The great part about recording is that most of the time the recording is not based on actual playtime, so you don’t have to watch the entire video or even have it play (you can theoretically pause most content and it will continue to ‘buffer’ and thus record.)

I really could not test the scheduler, much for the same reason as the WinAMP error; Every time I’d try to schedule a record of a Shoutcast stream, the application would crash. It is a great concept if you’d like to record your favorite program off of a Shoutcast or a specific set from a station, but it doesn’t work with WinAMP.

Reviewing the feature set of this application, one feature that seems to be missing (I could not test specifically for it due to the crash bug) is the lack of a stream splitting functionality. It would be nice to be able to split the files based on the split in the stream into separate MP3s, instead of one solid stream. As well, while this application does seem to support the most common formats, it would be handy to toss in QuickTime saving as well as Microsoft’s new Silverlight.

Final Verdict

While I’m not familiar with the 1.x series of this application, I would hope I’m assuming correctly that this version is a rework of the entire application. While this application does have a great concept, its implementation falls short in some aspects. The crashbug with Shoutcasts is a concern of mine as well. While free, if you’re looking for a FLV video or Windows Media capture tool, this may be a handy tool for you, especially if you’re using a browser that doesn’t currently support this style of functionality so long as you can deal with the quirky FLV bug. As for paying $39.95, I do feel that while this application could become worth a few dollars (Maybe not $39.95), however in its current form it is definitely not worth it. The interface needs some serious polishing, bugs obliterated and a little more functionality before I would consider shelling out money for this.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, October 02, 2007