Cyber Militia

One of my friends recently wanted my help with recording a web telecast for viewing offline. I thought it would be a good idea to write a small tutorial about it.

To capture good quality video without sacrificing a huge amount of disk space, we must compress it before storing it onto the disk.
One popular codec for compressing video is the DivX codec.
It’s compatible with almost all video editing/capturing software.
DivX homepage
Download DivX

For video editing/capturing, I recommend VirtualDub.
Virtual dub allows editing/converting/capturing video files with a variety of professional features.
VirtualDub homepage
Download VirtualDub

First, you’ll need to install both these software.To begin Video capture, fire up VirtualDub, and select “Capture AVI” from the File menu.

Next We need to set the Video Capture source :

All “Video for Windows” (VFW) compatible video devices connected to your computer should be available here.Thus you can capture video from sources like webcams, TV tuners, camcorders … basically almost any device that works with a computer.

Next we set the location to save the created video file :

Now to set up video compression :

You can also optionally configure advanced compression settings for the selected codec at this point (Select “Configure” at this dialogbox).

If you have your devices’s audio output connected to your computer’s line-in input, you may also want to configure audio compression at this point :

That’s it !
Just hit “F5” to start video capture, hit “Esc” to stop it.

Also note that if the device is not recognized by VirtualDub or doesn’t work with it for some reason, you can probably still capture compressed video using the software that came with your device.
Just look around for a option to set the compression codec for capture, and select DivX.