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How You Can Record Zattoo Streams

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How You Can Record Zattoo Streams

By CoCaman

In the past few days (and weeks) a lot of my visitors came to this blog via Google and a search for “Zattoo recorder”. I have to disappoint you: There is no built-in feature for recording videos/streams. But I did a little research and it looks like Zattoo does allow to be recorded. So I am presenting you a recording of a Zattoo broadcast:



(There is no sound, no need to turn your speakers up 😉 and the video is very, very, very large for just 2 minutes…)

I am pretty sure this is not legal and is against the ToS of Zattoo and thats why I am not going to show you how I did it! So don’t bug me with question. I just want to mention that people want to record shows/movies/series from Zattoo.

7 thoughts on “How You Can Record Zattoo Streams”

  1. Well this isn’t really a Hack. Your solution is just using a screen recorder. If you’d really wanted to record the original Zattoo Data, you’d have to reverse engineer Zattoo with a disassembler and a network sniffer.
    Zattoo, Inc has the possibility to provide the user a recording function, but they had to acquire a reocrding license with each TV Station they’re streaming. And the business modell (ads each time switching channels) won’t work as well. However, it is still possible that Zattoo is providing a recording function in the future.

  2. Apart from screen scraping which a number other people have been able to get to work I don’t know of any method.

  3. @P. True, but I think if they want to offer recording, they have to go for a paid service. Recording licenses must be extremely expensive…
    And reverse engineering might be hard. Or do you know which video codec they use?

  4. Their solution is based on H.264. Also, the streams are encrypted, so reverse-engineering Zattoo will be very hard of not impossible.

  5. As said before Zattoo streams H.264 (Video) and AAC (Sound). They use the OpenSSL Library for encryption. The data is transmitted to the pc, that means there are several ways to reverse engineer it. The “easiest” way of reverse engineering would be running zattoo (letting zattoo do the talking), and recording and decrypting the stream on the fly. Nobody said it would be easy.

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