SAN FRANCISCO — If the idea of being stuck on a plane for hours without access to the movies in your Netflix queue fills you with dread, software that lets you record streaming videos from the Web and watch them later on your laptop may be an appealing solution.
That’s the idea behind PlayLater, which bills itself as “the DVR for online videos.” It can record content from a number of different online sources — including Hulu, YouTube and Netflix — and save it to your computer. It costs $5 per month, or $50 per year. New users can try it free for two weeks before paying.
If you buy or rent more than a couple of digital videos from Amazon.com Inc. or Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store every month, PlayLater could sound like a money-saver. And while it’s a potentially useful product, it needs a lot of improvement before I’d be willing to shell out for it.
There’s also a possibility that websites like Netflix will find a way to block PlayLater. They’d probably want to, since it doesn’t jibe with the way they do business. In general, streaming movies are sold for less than ones available for download, so both websites and studios stand to lose from PlayLater.
Basically, the software works like this: When you click on a video within the PlayLater application to save it onto your computer, it plays the video in real time in a hidden browser window and copies it from there.
If you’re saving a video that includes commercials, they’ll be in there, too, but you’ll be able to skip past them when viewing.
The software, which for now only works on PCs running Microsoft’s Windows, is simple to download from the PlayLater.tv website and install. It works with 30 sites, or “channels,” ranging from the aforementioned Netflix, YouTube and Hulu to Cartoon Network, ESPN, Comedy Central and Internet radio service Pandora. For password-protected sites like Netflix, you’ll have to enter your login info.
The software is not hard to navigate, but it’s ugly and cumbersome with lots of text and few images.
The videos were somewhat fuzzy and colors are noticeably bland — probably a result of the software copying already-compressed streaming video and then compressing it again. The recordings looked decent when viewed in a smaller window, but weren’t sharp in full-screen mode.
And don’t expect to watch these videos on a tablet computer or smartphone just yet; they’re saved in a proprietary file format that can only be played on a computer running the software. This is intentional — the company doesn’t want you to spread your recorded videos around. But later this year the company hopes to allow playback on the iPad.
Watching PlayLater videos on my PC, I had a number of issues, perhaps indicating my laptop was too taxed to handle playing, recording and using other programs simultaneously. My computer crashed three times while using the program and others at the same time. Installation failed on one Windows 7 computer, and on another, Netflix recording failed.
There were problems with recording, too. Several times PlayLater indicated it recorded an entire TV show when it actually hadn’t.
As much as I like being able to watch movies offline and fast-forward through commercials, PlayLater isn’t the right tool in its current state. For things I can’t watch now, I’ll stick to paid downloads for playing later.
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