Where does Windows Media store the File

Obeel wrote, "I click pause and it pauses then I click and it plays immediately. No way its streaming."

I think what starts playing immediately when you unpause the stream is a cached segment of the file. Try pausing, disabling your Internet connection, then clicking play and see how long the show plays for before it stops and the player reads, "communicating..." and then "connection lost" or something like that. I mean it doesn't seem like you're actually getting a file deposited in the PC somewhere, but if you are, then I hope you'll post more to your topic about it.

I think that stuff is all a bunch of compressed data streams that require codecs (compression/decompression algorythums) to play on a device such as Windows Media Player. Even if you could convert the saved files to whatever type you need or put new codecs into your portable device, could you store an entire show in it's memory? That takes up a lot of space, doesn't it? I mean isn't that the reason they have streaming media, so you can download it a little at a time while you watch instead of waiting for the entire file to download first? Is there even enough memory for an entire show in a standard PC's memory? Maybe for audio, I guess. I don't know.

At any rate, you'd still have to download the entire file to save it, so if there isn't some actual file in there somewhere, you may need to just do what I guess most of us do and use a streaming media capture program to record files as they play for later use. Not the best, but it's all I know of that a person can do.

There are many programs available for that, but most of the free ones include spyware and other stuff you don't want. There are some free ones that are safe, authored by people who are okay, if you call making it possible to steal stuff okay. I guess the terms of use determine what you can do with stuff, but who can be worried about just when it is that you choose to listen to something they're offering for free in the first place? Of course you can always buy something really nice to use instead of using a free stream capture program.

I guess some Real Player streaming content files are created with select-record enabled, but I don't think that's the general way. I don't even think there is any record feature in Windows Media Player. I don't know about anyone else's experiences, but as far as Temporary Internet Files are concerned on my stuff, sometimes I see an actual media file in there, but not before the entire thing has played. Right now, I can't recall if any of that was happening with streaming media, though. It seems like with streaming content, all you get in Temporary Internet Files is some link to the stream. Maybe you can coinfigure Windows Media Player 10 to rip your shows, which are probably cosidered to be songs, and store them into whatever folder you select. I don't know how ripping works

I was hoping to see more about this question by now because I like to listen to archived C-SPAN shows, A Prarie Home Companion, Frontline Reports, and and other stuff while I play games online without using my bandwidth for the stream. Need that connection speed (4MBps down/384Kbps up) for gaming. If you found out how to do what you orginally asked at the beginning of this thread, I hope you will post about it so I can do that, too. So far, I just record shows while I'm away from the PC to play back later on the extra PC.

*Edit: BTW, I've tried some of those capture programs, but all usually I do is record with the little Soundblaster recorder thingo with it set on monitor and compress the files into MP3 format with Wave Studio to make them smaller. No need for the picture part while I'm looking at games.

Merry Christmas.