What is VLC?

VLC is a free, multi-format and open source media player application written by the VideoLAN project.

But playing your favorite movie or audio files is not the only thing it can do. It is also able to encode and stream audio or video content.

The other nice fact is, that it is running under a multitude of operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS and BSD.

What types of streams can I record with it?

With VLC you can easily record MMS, WMF and ASF streams.

Tell me how already!

To record a stream you first need to get the streaming URL. You can mostly do that be right-clicking the video picture and selecting “Properties…”:

Look at the “Location” info on the Properties dialog:

Mark and copy the link by pressing CTRL+C and start up VLC. Now go to Media -> Convert/Save… click on the Network tab and paste the URL you copied from the stream earlier into the text box. It should look like this:

The next thing you have to do is to click on Convert / Save and you will see this dialog:

First, enter the file name of the destination file including the extension, e.g. NasaTV.asf
Tick the “Display the output” check box to see how the stream looks like while you’re recording. Then you select the Profile, which defines how the file format will be recorded as and click “Start”. I usually use “Video – WMV + WMA (ASF)”.

Now you will have to be patient, because it can take up to 1 minute, depending on your internet connection, for VLC to start displaying and recording the stream. When you think you have recorded enough, just click on the stop button to close the file you’re currently recording into.

You can download the VLC player on the official website.