Stream recorders for Mac OS X

Stream recorders for Mac OS X
Streaming media recorders for Mac OS X or several platforms can be used on Mac.

Shareware Jaksta for Mac is your best choice.

You may also try freeware MPlayer and VLC media player, which can dump streaming audio and video files onto your hard drive; but they will require you to find stream URLs manually.

There are also Windows Media stream recorders for Mac OS: Mac ASF Recorder, ASF Recorder X.

Stream recorders for Windows on Mac OS X
As you may have notices Streaming media recorders for Windows are more powerful, moreover they are available in abundance.

Luckily you may use Windows software on an Intel based Mac running Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop for Max OS X.

Parallels Desktop for Max OS X even allows you to run Windows on your Mac OS X at the same time without rebooting.

Wine emulator is not as powerful as a standalone Windows or Windows that you can run on a virtual machine, but it is absolutely free and you can run some Windows applications with it right from your Mac. Here is how to install it:
How to install Wine on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)

You can run Replay Media Catcher on Mac OS using freeware WINE or WineBottler:
How to install and run Replay Media Catcher on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)

Flash stream recorders for Mac OS X (supporting RTMP protocol)

Jaksta for Mac allows to download HTTP and RTMP videos from Flash player.

TubeMaster++ for Mac OS is under development.

You can use command line tool rtmpdump, but you may have problems finding RTMP and RTMPE URLs for this utility. You may try rtmpsrv and rtmpsuck that come with rtmpdump.

Recording HTTP flash video streams on Mac OS X

You can do this right from Safari.

1. Go to a flash video page and hold down Option-Apple-A
2. An activity window opens
3. Scan all the processes and look for a the only large file in the list (500 Kb to as much as 10Mb) file that is often still in the process of downloading (sometimes but not always with a .flv suffix)
4. Double click it and OSX downloads it.

If you install the free Qucktime plugin Perian, you can watch the flash files right in quicktime.


If you using the Firefox browser then there are many add-ons, i using the Fast Video Download, VideoDownloadHelper or NetVideoHunter to download videos, and it works well for me not only on youtube but on other video sites that use HTTP protocol too.