Jane Hoskyn shows you where to find your old favourites online and how to save them for watching in comfort
Remember the first time you set the video to record a TV programme? VHS felt revolutionary (and a bit naughty) because it let you watch your favourite programmes when you wanted to, instead of when Auntie Beeb or ITV wanted you to. You no longer had to choose between going out or watching Doctor Who. Even better (or naughtier), you could watch it over and over again at your leisure.
Then the internet came along, with its streaming video services like YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer, and you could watch what you wanted, when you wanted, where you wanted. You could search for an old favourite on YouTube and there it was, as clear (well, as fuzzy) as it was in the comer of your parents' living room all those years ago.
Keep lost treasures
There’s a sizeable snag to internet video - it doesn’t belong to you. Whoever uploaded the video can remove it as well. Content on broadcasters’ sites, like iPlayer and the excellent TCM site (Turner Classic Movies, www.tcm.com), is available for a limited time period, usually between one and three months.
Then there’s the buffering problem. Unless your broadband is particularly smooth and fast, streaming video is a stop-and-start affair. The iPlayer’s built-in downloads tool lets you save shows to watch offline, but only for 30 days. After that, the file self-destructs. So Auntie Beeb is still telling you what you can and can’t do, even though you pay her upwards of £145 a year for your licence.
Here, we’ll show you how to save your long-lost favourite TV shows and films for as long as you want. We’ll reveal which video-downloading tools actually work, and explain how to record video as it plays on your screen. We’ll also outline the legal rights and wrongs of capturing online broadcasts.
Once that’s out of the way, we can move on to the fun stuff. We’ll take you on a journey through the internet’s video vaults, showing you where and how to find lost classics before picking out our favourite hidden gems.
RECORD TV SHOWS AND FILMS FROM THE WEB
Record online video for free
Screen-recording is the direct digital descendant of VHS. You simply record what’s playing or broadcasting on your PC’s screen, then save it as a video file to watch when you want.
The very best tool for the job, Camtasia (www.snipca.com/15918), costs more than your first video recorder (£236.45 inc VAT, to be precise). You can buy a new iPad Mini 2 for less (www.snipca.com/15926). Fortunately, Camtasia has a more affordable little sister, Snagit (www.snipca.com/15919, £39.50; free 15-day trial). If you become very keen on screen-recording and want excellent results, Snagit won’t disappoint.
There are free alternatives, but most force you to compromise on recording time. Jing (www.snipca.com/15921) records great-quality video, but only up to five minutes in length. Screenr (www.screenr.com) also lets you record up to five minutes and works entirely in your browser, without the need to download anything.
To record without time restrictions, use the free program Any Video Recorder (AVR, www.any-video-recorder, com). You can use it to record anything that moves, as long as it’s on your PC’s screen: YouTube videos, iPlayer broadcasts, Netflix shows and any TV or film gems you find.
AVR lets you select an area of your screen to record (useful if you want to carry on working in a different window), then automatically saves the recording to your hard drive as a good-quality MP4 video file.
AVR’s website has a strong hint of “too good to be true” and we braced ourselves for a truckload of adware in the installer, but there were no extras to opt out of at all. The installer correctly predicted that we’d see a Windows Security warning and assured us it was safe, so we clicked Install this driver software anyway’ and didn’t encounter any problems.
When the program opens, give it a test run by clicking the Record Now button. Your Desktop may disappear for a moment, which is a bit scary, but it will come back. Click Manual in the little blue window that appears. There’s an automatic option that tries to detect any video playing on your screen, but it doesn’t seem to work - at least not reliably.
After a couple of moments a red square will appear on your screen. Drag it to fit round the video you want to record, input a time limit if you want, then click the Rec button. You can also start and stop recording by pressing Ctrl+F7. When you press Stop, AVR processes and saves the MP4 to your chosen folder, which opens automatically in Windows (File) Explorer. Click it to play it in your default video player, or copy it to your tablet or laptop to watch while out and about.
If you want to crop or trim your recording, we recommend the excellent free online video editor WeVideo (https://www.wevideo.com). You can also convert your MP4s and other video files to alternative formats using WeVideo.
Download YouTube videos safely using VLC
Tlie best place to find classic clips and shows is YouTube, the web’s biggest video site (in fact it’s the third-most visited site of all, behind Google and Facebook). But YouTube is designed for watching videos online, not for saving them to watch offline, and its owner Google cracks down hard on attempts to get around this. That’s why most of the “YouTube downloader” extensions you’ll find online don’t work, and many are unsafe.
Fortunately, there’s no need to use them. You can either record YouTube videos as they play using Any Video Recorder, or you can download them using a hidden tool in our favourite media player, VLC (www.snipca.com/15928).
Downloading is more hit and miss than screen-recording, and in our experience it doesn’t work with all online videos. But it does work with most YouTube videos, and it frees you from the need to play a video while you capture it.
First, go to YouTube and find a video you want to save, then copy its URL to your clipboard. Open VLC and click Media, then Open Network Stream. Paste the URL into the box and click Play. Your YouTube video will now start playing in VLC.
That’s impressive enough, but here’s where it really gets clever. Click Tools, then Codec Information and, in the box that opens, right-click the long line of text in the Location box at the bottom and choose Select All. Press Ctrl+C to copy the text, then paste it into your browser’s address bar. When you press Enter, the video will open in YouTube’s server. Right-click the video as it plays and select ‘Save Video as’ (see screenshot left), then choose a location on your hard drive to download the file to.
Type a name (say, quatermass) into the ‘File name’ box (where it says ‘videoplayback’ by default), followed by .mp4 (so in our example, the whole thing would read ‘quatermass.mp4’). If you don’t include the file extension as well, the exported file will not work. Press Save, and the file will download. Click to play it in your default video player.
FIND THE WEB'S BEST CLASSIC TV SHOWS AND FILMS
Find classic shows in seconds on YouTube
Now we’ve dealt with the technical stuff, we can move on to the fun part: watching telly. YouTube is still the first place we turn to for video clips, and its search engine is as powerful as you’d expect from a site that’s been owned by Google since 2006.
It’s really good for finding clips and entire episodes of a programme when you can’t quite remember the full name. For example, type dixon dock into the search box, and YouTube instantly offers a wealth of content from vintage police drama Dixon of Dock Green, including the first and second episodes in full, the opening credits, the closing credits and an audio track of the theme (and that’s just the first page of results).
Narrow your search by clicking the Filters button at the top-left and clicking filters such as ‘Subtitles/CC’ (only see videos with closed-caption subtitles), ‘Long (>20 minutes)’ (videos longer than 20 minutes; ideal for finding full episodes), and Programme (videos whose uploader has marked them as TV programmes).
To find whole series or groups of clips, use the Playlist Alter. Type your search term, click Filters, then Playlist. For example, our ‘dixon dock’ search found playlists containing several Dixon of Dock Green episodes; a ‘crime drama’ playlist containing 16 episodes of various series (www.snipca.com/15944), including the original Dragnet and Z Cars; and a playlist of TV shows starring PC George Dixon himself, actor Jack Warner (www.snipca.com/15945).
In most cases, you won’t have to record or download a YouTube video to watch it again later. There’s every chance it’ll still be there in a week, a month or a year. You can save videos to a Watch List by clicking the little clock icon under the player. You can also save entire playlists by clicking the ‘+’ symbol at the top right of the playlist player. Find your Watch Later list and saved playlists by clicking the three horizontal lines next to the YouTube logo whenever you’re signed into your account.
However, YouTube videos can (and do) get taken off the site, either by YouTube or by the person who uploaded them. So if you record your favourites and save them to your hard drive, you’ll know you can watch them whenever you want - and without the need for an internet connection.
What to record: 176 Monty Python sketches in one playlist (www.snipca. com/15922). For more comedy gold, search for ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ to find plenty of TV and radio episodes from East Cheam’s finest. Britain’s greatest ever comedy duos - Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies - also crop up a lot on YouTube, with Christmas specials in full and classic sketches (‘Four candles’, Andre Previn etc). You’ll even find some of Morecambe and Wise’s films from the 1960s, including the spy spoof The Intelligence Men.
Download vintage TV from The Internet Archive
In our Cover Feature in Issue 440 (‘What you must Download in 2015’), we shared our love for The Internet Archive (https://archive.org), an incredible resource of TV shows, films, audio clips and even computer games that are old enough to be out of copyright. Because of their licence-free status, you don’t have to use third-party tools to record them - you can simply download them straight from the Internet Archive website, all for free.
The site is US-based, so its Television section (www.snipca.com/15946) has a distinctly American flavour, with transatlantic treats including The Three Stooges and You Bet Your Life, the legendary quiz show presented by Groucho Marx. Click a video to view it, and click ‘MPEG4’ at the bottom right of the player to download it in MP4 format.
To focus on home-grown content, click the British tag in the right-hand list (or go straight here: www.snipca.com/ 15947) and browse the results. Here we found classic episodes of Coronation Street (www.snipca.com/15939), The Avengers (www.snipca.com/15949) and Armchair Theatre (www.snipca.com/15948), all with free download links below the player.
To continue browsing, click the tags (blue links) below the videoplayer window. The site isn’t as well organised as YouTube, and the search tool is less powerful, but that actually makes it more fun to explore. Sometimes you uncover the best gems when you didn’t know you were looking for them.
What to download: The first episode of perhaps the best sitcom of all time, Steptoe and Son (www.snipca.com/15938). There are also episodes from the chilling 1950s sci-fi classic Quatermass and the Pit.
Collect classic Doctor Who episodes
As we mentioned, the BBC keeps a tight rein on its content. The corporation’s golden goose, Doctor Who, is particularly well guarded, and you won’t find any classic episodes on the iPlayer.
YouTube has plenty of Doctor Who clips (such as Jon Pertwee’s regeneration into Tom Baker: www.snipca.com/15950), but full episodes tend to get quickly removed following copyright requests. The Internet Archive has free downloadable Doctor Who audio clips, comics and ebooks (www.snipca.com/15955), but no episodes.
What’s a Who fan to do? Go to Hell’s Library (www.snipca.com/15936). Here, you’ll find a link to nearly every episode of the ‘classic’ (20th century) Doctor Who, most of them uploaded by fans -and plenty of non- Doctor Who content, too. Most links open automatically in Google Docs (https://docs.google.com), where you can play the video in your browser or click the Download arrow at the top of the window to save the file. The Hell’s Library FAQ (www.snipca.com/15952) recommends saving files as MP4 and playing them in VLC for offline viewing.
The Doctor Who ‘reboot’ (21st century series) is all currently available on Netflix (www.snipca.com/15953, £5.99 a month) but the classic series is not. We found classic episodes on Amazon Instant Video (www.snipca.com/16004), but again they’re not free. Most cost £1.89, with a series costing £5.99.
The best-quality source of classic Doctor Who episodes is US streaming site Hulu (www.snipca.com/15932). However, to use it, you’ll have to pay a subscription ($7.99 a month, around £5.40) and pretend you have a US IP address by using the free Chrome extension Hola (www.snipca.com/15933). To find out more about beating internet restrictions by using Hola and other tools that disguise your location.
Whatever geographical tricks you pull, you won’t be able to download episodes from Netflix, Amazon or Hulu using any built-in tools. You pay to watch them online only. The only way to keep them is to use a screen recorder.
What to record: Watch and download the first Doctor Who episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’, from Hell’s Library (www.snipca.com/15936). For just over a fiver, you can watch the whole classic 1973 series ‘The Time Warrior’, with Jon Pertwee, on Amazon (www.snipca.com/15954). And for a special treat, here are 707 Doctor Who episodes playing at the same time (www.snipca.com/15935).
Save classic films and find lost treasures
Unless you happen to have your very own cinema down the back of the garden, the best place to watch full-length films for free is Black And White Movies (www.bnwmovies.com). Click a thumbnail to choose a genre (such as Animation, War, Western or Classic), then click a film’s thumbnail to watch it using the built-in player, which has a full-screen mode. Films rated highest by users are listed at the top, with the brilliant courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (www.snipca.com/15968) leading the pack.
You can download films for free using Black And White Movies, but the process is trickier than with The Internet Archive. Click the little red download button a few lines below the player, then right-click one of the links (go for the one ending ‘.mp4’ if available), click Save As and save the video file to your computer. Alternatively, use a screen recorder.
The Internet Archive has a smaller selection of films. Go to the site’s Feature Films section (www.snipca.com/15960) for classics including the Cary Grant newspaper comedy His Girl Friday (www.snipca.com/15962) and more obscure gems such as West of Hot Dog (www.snipca.com/15963), a silent western that Stan Laurel made before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy.
For more recent blockbusters like 7he Godfather you’ll need a more conventional source such as TCM (www.tcm.com/watchtcm). The channel’s website makes films available to view online for around a month after they’ve been shown on TV, so the selection is changing all the time. Streaming quality is superb.
YouTube has plenty of full-length films to watch for free. Tread carefully, though, because they’re not always what they seem. When we searched YouTube for Some Like It Hot and clicked ‘Some Like It Hot Full Movie’ (complete with reassuring ‘1:40:07’ timestamp), there was no video of the film - just a gaudy row' of arrows and a link to a nameless “movie downloads” site. There is plenty of good-quality film content on YouTube, but do be aware of these occasional scams.
An inescapable problem with recording and downloading films is they devour hard-drive space. Even a relatively short feature like Laurel and Hardy’s The Flying Deuces, free to download from The Internet Archive (www.snipca.com/15961), is a 1.5GB file. So we’d recommend investing in an external hard drive and saving your recordings to that to avoid clogging up your PC.
What to watch: If you’re in a serious mood, watch the stunning silent classic Battleship Potemkin (www.snipca.com/15964). If you’re not, join Charlie Chaplin for Twenty Minutes of Lore (www.snipca.com/15965).
IS IT LEGAL TO RECORD ONLINE TV?
In short, yes - as long as you're recording it for your own private use. UK copyright law currently lets you make a copy of an online broadcast, as long as you do so in your own home to watch at a more convenient time. The same is true whether you're recording to VHS or a hard drive.
You need a valid TV Licence to record or watch shows as they're being shown on TV, regardless of what channel they're on, according to the TV Licensing website (www.snipca.com/15958). You don’t currently need a licence to watch or record time-shifted content.
But while recording web video is within legal boundaries, sharing your recordings is not. Don’t make copies for your friends or for YouTube, and don't even think about selling them - that's piracy. For more on content theft and its grey areas, see Fact UK (www.snipca.com/15959).
Be aware that a website's own terms and conditions may be more strict than the letter of the law, and some may prohibit recording or downloading of their video streams. Keep doing it (that is, keep being caught doing it), and you may find your account is deleted.