Screen capture method

The screen capture method grabs the video directly from the screen. Even if this method has some inconvenience compared to the network capture (the video must be played on your screen the whole duration of the capture), it makes Video DownloadHelper work on all sites, regardless of the underlying streaming protocol, as long as the video is playing within a flash applet.

Move the mouse over the red disk to see what region of the screen will be captured. Click to start the capture.	Click the red square to stop the capture.	Decide what to do with this capture: save, convert, ...

You can also start the capture by right clicking on the DownloadHelper icon and go to Screen capture. This shows the possible regions that can be captured, in case the right one is not picked by default.

To enable that Screen Capture feature:

• Make sure you are running Firefox 4.0 or later. It won't work on previous versions. If you haven't already done so, upgrade your browser from here.
• Open the Video DownloadHelper add-on preferences, section Capture, tab Screen Capture and check the Enable Screen capture box.
• Once the screen capture has been setup, you'll see a new button next to the DownloadHelper toolbar icon. Click it to start the capture of the currently playing video. Click again to stop the capture and save the file. Alternatively, you can use the context menu (right-click in the page but outside the flash area) to choose the screen region to be captured.

The Screen Capture feature relies on external tools to do the grabbing, therefore it depends on the platform you are running on:

• on Windows: you will have to also install the CSHelper add-on which provides a modified version of CamStudio. CSHelper and the software applications it contains are open sourced.
• on Linux, the feature relies by default on the recordmydesktop application. If you are running Ubuntu, you may have to do sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop to install that program. On other Linux distributions, you'll figure out. You also may want to use another screen grabbing utility like xvidcap or something else: please let us know about your setup if you succeed.
• on Mac OS X, we haven't yet identified a suitable screen grabbing utility. If you are a Mac warrior and want to make some research on this, we'd love to hear from you.