How do you capture C-SPAN videos?

There is no free and easy way I know of to "download" C-SPAN videos. Real Player won't work, Download Helper won't work, none of that stuff will. Pretty much your only option is to use screen capture software. Camstudio, which is free and safe/reputable, will do the job. If you don't have a relatively fast computer though the quality of your video will suffer as you will have to settle for a lower number of frames per second. You can install Camstudio as an accessory to Download Helper in Firefox or download and install directly from the website.

There is another option however - you can download many videos from the C-SPAN website by purchasing them and then downloading them to your computer. For example, if you wanted to download this video, there is a "purchase" link along the right hand side you can click on. It's only a few bucks so it's probably worth it if you want a nice quality video and don't want to mess around learning how to use a screen capture program like Camstudio.
 
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Recently I've found this software from www.e2esoft.cn - they have a virtual sound card and a virtual video card that you can use to pretty much do anything you want. The two of them cost $50 and I paid it, and usually I manage to find free software to do what I need to but I was really impressed with some of the things I could pull off.

For example, I managed to record yesterday's Squawk Box (with Ron Paul, CNBC) and route the audio through Ableton Live, mix it with two other video feeds and another audio feed, just to see if I could. Adobe Visual Communicator can handle three video and three audio feeds at once and those two products from e2esoft worked for me.

My next task is to stream through StreamTorrent and SwarmPlayer. In a separate test I could mix Skype in with other feeds, and supposedly you can route any video feed through gmail video chat, I'm pretty sure I can get a telephone into the "system".

Anyway, I don't usually shill for non-open-source software, but these two products have pretty much solved all the problems that I had given up trying to solve. If you can record a webcam you can record any video feed as they all now appear as webcams to the recording application so you just choose "Virtual Web Cam 1,2, or 3" or route VirtualSoundCard1 to the audio input, for example.
 
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