How to record the Olympic games from CBC

This tutorial will show you how to record the Olympic games from an internet streaming source using VLC. Since I am in Canada, I'm recording from CBC Olympics, which streams the videos in Windows Media format, but this procedure should work for other non-flash, non-silverlight, streaming videos as well (i.e. not YouTube or NBC Olympics).

1. Load the video that you want, eg. from CBC Olympics

2. Right-click the video

3. Select "Properties" from the right-click menu



4. Copy the URL of the streaming video



Edit (Aug. 14): The CBC is smarter than I give them credit. You can't just get the URL as described above. What you have to do is look at the URL of the page, something like:
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/livevideo/#n=cbcsports_ca_4&p=athletics&e=mens_100m_round_1&dt=2008/08/14_08:49%20PM&s=http://authmfile.akamai.com.edgesuite.net/akamai.stream.auth/35018/wm/cbcwm.gen/v001/reflector:13377.js

Then, load that in your web browser (Internet Explorer doesn't load this page for me, but Firefox does), and there is a single line, something like:
var streamPath = "http://authmfile.akamai.com.edgesuite.net/akamai.stream.auth/35018/wm/cbcwm.gen/token_MTIxODc2ODQwMw==_febc7bc84345875bacae79a34caf97c4//reflector:19191.asx";

The URL in between the quotation marks is the actual URL to the streaming video.


5. Open VLC and open a network stream



6. Select HTTP source

7. Paste in the URL

8. Select "Stream/Save" in the "Advanced Options"

9. Click "Settings..."



10. Select "Play locally" and "File"

11. Specify the save file, eg. "Women's Volleyball - USA vs Japan.wmv"

12. Select "ASF" under "Encapsulation Method" (because the video is in Windows Media format)



13. Click "OK" twice to close the windows for steps 6-9 and 10-12, then watch as it also records (you can also close the browser window from step 1)



14. When you want to stop recording, click stop or close VLC, then rename the save file to .wmv (VLC adds an extra '}' to the end of the filename by accident)