Help understanding what's happening during screen capturing
I am currently using Audials Moviebox to screen capture Silverlight Smooth Streaming DRM protected videos from a website. What I have noticed is that when Audials is recording the stream, ffmpeg is running in the background. Also, when the video starts to play within Firefox, a dll gets downloaded named plugin-LivePassModuleMain.dll which I am assuming is what is used to decrypt and/or authorize the stream for playback within Silverlight. It also keeps a cache of at least a few minutes worth of the stream in a Firefox cache folder. The website pops up it's own player over the website page, not in a separate window, but much like Amazon's player. I am guessing that Audials is forwarding the player output to ffmpeg in real-time as the video is streaming.
While it does an admirable job in recording the stream, I can tell that the bitrate keeps fluctuating during playback, resulting in choppiness and, when it really gets low, mosaic-like blockiness in the resulting video file. Since it offers 5 levels of streaming in the manifest file, 350K to 2M, is there any way to somehow have it download the entire stream in 2M and then play it all back utilizing that dll for the DRM decryption (assuming that's what it's used for) and ffmpeg or maybe even VLC to join all the segments and write the output to a decrypted file. In other words, attempting to stream it locally and then record it that way without any latency or fluctuation in bitrates. I'm a stickler for quality and am trying to capture the highest level available, but it never works out that way.
Does this sound at all possible? I'm guessing if it was, someone would have figured out how to do it by now. But it was an idea I've had for some time, but not enough technical know-how to figure out if and how it would actually work, since I don't know enough about all the moving parts that would be involved to make this all happen.
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