When I read other people’s stories I realise firstly that I am not alone and secondly that I am only a small fish compared to them. Data Hoarders even has its own section in Reddit, and people happily talk about Terrabytes of “data” and then… there is the Petabyte Porn Project... so, yeah, I am a small fish. Doesn’t mean I still don’t have a problem, but everything in context.
Only relatively recently I started downloading seriously – maybe 300gb of videos a day. I am not talking downloading using chrome plugins or right-clicking and Save As, rather I mean using programs which can capture live streams.
A brief history of my progression:
I started using Video Downloader plugin for Chrome. Of course I made a $10 donation. This is good for downloading from porn sites, but doesn’t record live streams like Chaturbate.
Around this time I discovered FFMPEG. Can’t remember where I found this, but this set me on the path for downloading from live cam steams. I also rediscovered Chaturbate, which is very nice in that it shows the m3u8 stream in the page source. So I would CTRL+U to open the source, CTRL+F to find m3u8 and copy the whole string. I had created a small batch file which took the m3u8 and the performer name as input and downloaded it.
ffmpeg -loglevel error -i %1 -ab 384k -acodec ac3 -qscale 0 %2.mp4
I really didn’t know what the stuff meant, but it seemed to work. It was a slow process – opening the camgirl, opening the source, finding the m3u8, pasting it into a new dos window, copying the performer name, pasting it and then hitting save. Of course, I got faster and faster, but there is a limitation before the CPU gets overloaded.. I think about 8 simultaneous downloads and the result was lots of broken or semi-working recordings, which had lots of “pauses” in them.
A short while later I discovered a website called RECGASM.COM. This site allowed you to paste the URL of the performer into a box, and it started recording automatically. There was a small 5 Euro fee to pay per month (Patreon) to allow multiple recording up to 10. So this kept me happy for a short while until it started ending the recordings after a few seconds.
Then I found m3u8x, a simple little program that extracted the streams from the m3u8 link (it meant I had to revert to finding the link again from the page source), and once again, only allowed recording a few before CPU went to 100%.
Finally I found Allavsoft. I had actually switched to using OSX on my iMac instead of Windows 10 (bootcamp) at the same time. Allavsoft has both Windows and Mac versions, so I bought the Mac version. It was great. Simply paste the URL into it, and it started recording. Sometimes I was recording 90+ or more streams simultaneously !! I was in webcam recording heaven. Only later, I found out that the streams were slightly broken in that there was pauses in the videos. I didn’t really mind, cos I usually fast forwarded through the recording anyway.
I recorded to my heart’s content for about a year. I now have 40 TB of disk space with webcam recordings that I made, or downloaded from other sites. And then, just like that, I stopped. Reinstalled OSX on my Mac, and now refrain even from visiting Webcam sites. I’m clean now for a month, although I fell off the wagon once.
If anyone wants to buy 10 x 4TB disks worth of webcam recordings, send me a comment. Just the retail value alone of the disks is 1000 Euro – Western Blue, good quality. Not really willing to split. Comes in a nice, metal, protective carrying case.
