Freeware software for re-recording DRM protected audio and video files

[ulrichburke]

Dear Everybody.

I've used this on 20 movies downloaded from ITunes so far. It's worked every time. And it's legitimately free.

I don't have a powerful computer. 140gig hard drive spare, 1.7gig processor, gigabyte motherboard, that's it. This is NOT spam even though it mentions a third party piece of software, because the software is open source.

It's called CamStudio.

All you do is start the video playing in ITUNES, then press PAUSE in ITUNES. Press RECORD in Cam Studio. You'll get a little 'magic wand'. Use this to draw a box around your ITUNES Player window, making sure you just draw it around the window and not around anything else (like the desktop, the grey area of the player etc.)

Then press PLAY on ITUNES.

Cam Studio will capture the WHOLE movie! When the movie's finished, just press the STOP button (blue rectangle) in Cam Studio and leave it to compress the audio/render the file. It's fast, a 90 minute movie takes about 25 minutes on my not-fast computer. Then hey presto! You've got a copy of the movie you can play anywhere, burn to DVD, do whatever you like with.

I've never found any jerkiness/drop-out problems and, like I keep saying, my computer's pretty slow.

Love to know people's reactions to this. It works on streaming video too - if you're watching an online movie, you can record it as you're watching it with Cam Studio.

Cam Studio is on Sourceforge, it is legitimately free, open source. That's why this post isn't SPAM, even though it's all about one piece of software, I'm nothing to do with Sourceforge, I just found it and discovered it's a salvation to all these DRM probs.



Audio files with DRM? Audacity - also from SourceForge and open source. Just press RECORD on Audacity, Play on ITUNES and it will record your song for you. Then just export the file as an MP3 and there you go. Again, I've never noticed any loss in sound quality and I've done many, many ITUNES tracks like that.

Yours respectfully (I feel quite pleased with myself for discovering this, even though I know I'm setting myself up to have my balloons busted!)

ulrichburke