Recording Hope Channel Internet Broadcasts

Hope Channel is the Adventist church's global television network. It offers its programs over satellite and also as streamed video on the Internet.

Given where we live, it doesn't make sense right now for us to purchase satellite equipment. But there are occasional programs on the Hope Channel that are of interest to us. The other problem is the time difference. Alaska is simply not a large enough market for convenient broadcast times for major programs, so we have to accommodate our schedule, or have to record it first.

Therein lies the problem. The regular PC media players don't include features to record, let alone schedule, Internet streamed videos. So that began my search for some other program to allow me to record the stream as a file, and hopefully to schedule recordings so they would get recorded without me having to start and stop it.

I found a free one that did allow recording to file, but it was complicated and did not do well with Akamai caching and load-balanced media servers. It also did not include scheduling capabilities.

So I continued my search and found WM Recorder, a $49.95 program that does everything I need. It's actually an ingenious little program in that it uses existing media players to actually play the media, then sniffs the network packets and stores the data as it arrives. That means it doesn't need its own codecs to decode or encode the video and audio. All this program needs to know is to recognize media streams, and then repackage the data as a local file that looks good to a media player application.

I've used WM Recorder a few times now, and it's done what I needed. I'd eventually like to get a satellite dish installed (I'll be trading static for dropped frames, I guess), but for now this solution will be sufficient.