Conference Recorder 2 - Record iChat audio/video chats
May 10, '06 07:30:02AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
[This is the Pick of the Week for the week of May 1st]
First, let me say that the lame icon at top right is not the program's official icon. It's a quickie I put together, as the program itself is simply an Apple installer package. So don't write about how poor the icon is :).
A lot of my job relies on iChat -- with Macworld staffers spread around the country, it's a primary method of communication for many of us. As such, I've long had iChat's logging feature enabled (to the tune of 5,000+ archived chats), as I often need to revisit something that's been discussed. While this works well, both audio and video chats have become more prevalent in the last year or so. If I knew about the discussion ahead of time, and felt it important enough, I would set up Snapz Pro X to capture the audio and video for possible future use. But that was a pain, and meant that I couldn't move the iChat window around on the screen (since I was capturing a fixed region), nor activate a window that would cover the iChat window.
Enter Conference Recorder 2, from eCamm Network. This cool little tool integrates directly with iChat, allowing you to record audio and video chats (though you'll only get the audio from a more-than-two-person video chat). Dan Frakes covered it in detail in this Mac Gems writeup. As seen in Dan's story, Conference Recorder 2 puts a small "record" palette below every iChat window (or optionally in a window of its own). Click the Record button, and the audio and video are captured in MPEG4 format. There's also a bundled conversion application that will convert to MP3, for easier use in podcasts.
I don't see the need to record every video or audio chat I participate in, but it's nice to know that it's now literally as simple as a click of the mouse to do so.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060509163053553