2021-11-25 19:24
(This post was last modified: 2022-11-23 19:52 by Mitch_Shepard.)
CTB Recorder
I found an easy way to watch (skim through) studio and other tedious shows to get to any good parts without wasting hours trying to stay awake watching them live. First, download the free CTB Recorder application found in the file ctbrec-[version]-win64-jre.zip from here: https://mastodon.cloud/@ctbrec
(I'm not affiliated with this application. I simply found it, use it and think it's useful to have. If you need support for CTB Recorder, look at the link above and you'll see Discord: followed by a link to the author's Discord server. As far as I know, that's how to get support but I've never tried it.)
This application isn't like Moniturbate where you have to pay a fee every month to do anything useful with it. You can record as many rooms as you like automatically with CTB Recorder, and everything is free. You can even watch live streams in VLC media player through CTB Recorder if you like.
It supports Amateur.tv, BongaCams, Cam4, CamSoda, Chaturbate of course, FC2Live, Flirt4Free, LiveJasmin, MVLive, MyFreeCams, Showup.tv, Streammate, Stripchat and XloveCam.
Click on 'Spoiler' to keep reading. It's a long post and I didn't want to clog up the whole thread.
Installation
It's easy to set up and use but a little tutorial will be provided to get you started. There's no installer. Just unzip the downloaded archive into a folder wherever you like. I put mine in c:\ctbrec
Open the folder you unzipped to, right-click on ctbrec.exe then select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut). You can now start CTB Recorder using the shortcut on your Desktop and move that shortcut to wherever you want it.
Finally, free hidden shows?!
CTB Recorder will automatically record as many shows as you like whenever the room starts broadcasting. "Does it record private shows or ticket shows?" Of course not. If there is a way to do that, you won't read about it in an open forum free of charge. I've never heard of anything that bypasses the paywalls and CTB Recorder does not.
CTB Recorder records (or plays live in VLC) what you can watch for free because you have to pay to get hidden content. I have heard of bots that automate the recording of ticket shows and spy on privates, but not for free. The bots just tip automatically then probably call something like CTB Recorder to do the recording.
If you know about this, maybe you could write a tutorial here because there'd be more content to share if everyone had automated solutions.
Auto-start CTB Recorder
You can make CTB Recorder start automatically with Windows, so it automatically records whenever your PC is on, by pasting a copy of the Desktop shortcut you created above into this folder:
c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp\
That's the startup folder for "all users", meaning CTB Recorder will always auto-start whenever anyone logs into Windows. If you want to limit CTB Recorder so it only auto-starts when one user logs in, instead copy its shortcut to this folder:
c:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\
If you use the folder above, replace [USERNAME] with the Windows username you want CBT Recorder to auto-start with at login.
Setting up CTB Recorder for the first time
The first time you start CTB Recorder it'll take you right to the Settings tab. You can select a category of settings in the left pane while the pane on the right has the individual settings for each category. Following are the settings you're likely to change.
User Agent is what CTB Recorder reports to the different websites (such as Chaturbate.com) when it connects. It pretends to be Firefox for Linux (or Android on mobile) by default. That's fine even on Windows it doesn't matter, so just leave it at the default value. I think the author included this setting in case sites like Chaturbate.com start refusing to connect in the future. If that happens, it'll be simple for CTB Recorder to pretend its another web browser just by changing these strings.
Enable live previews (experimental) pops up a preview of the video feed you're watching (see below), if you have one open. I found the preview window to get in the way and I couldn't see how to move it, so I turned that off again. Try it and see if you like it. If not, just turn it back off.
Start Tab can be changed from "Settings" to "Recording" so that when CTB Recorder starts, it takes you right to the tab where recordings of different rooms are set up. There's no need to go to the Settings tab every time.
Start only one player at a time may also be unchecked, though I'm not sure why it's checked by default. CTB Recorder plays live streams in VLC (from streams inside tabs to the left like the "Chaturbate" tab). If you let it open multiple instances of VLC, you can have multiple streams open at once. If you leave this setting checked, when you open another stream, it will open in the same instance of VLC, meaning you'll only be able to have one stream open at a time.
I unchecked this, it works fine playing multiple streams in multiple instances of VLC and I haven't noticed any problems. If you do notice problems, set it back to its default value.
Where to store recordings
On the Recorder screen, change Recordings Directory to a location where you have lots of free space to store the recordings of shows. I tried "one directory for each model" in Directory Structure initially, but CTB Recorder uses filenames in the format:
Model_name_[date]_[time]
I found it just clutters things up to have different models stored in different folders but set this as you like.
I haven't changed anything else in this or any other category, so you should be good to go.
Recording shows
To set up a room to record, open the Recording tab.
At the top-left beside "Model", you can enter the room you wish to record in either of these formats:
Chaturbate:model_name
https://chaturbate.com/model_name (the URL)
Replace model_name with the model you want to record. For example:
Chaturbate:lilu_coy
https://chaturbate.com/coy_amina
How to watch live feeds
If you click on the CamSoda tab and some others and don't see any streams, it's likely because your VPN has been detected. Some of these sites make you shut your VPN down so they can use IP addresses as though they're photo ID that belong to a specific person they've banned.
Click on the Chaturbate tab in CTB Recorder.
You now see a reasonable facsimile of the home page at Chaturbate.com. To view a show in VLC, just double-click on the name of the room. (I find it a bit finicky to click on the video image itself. It works better to click on the text just below the video.) Alternatively, move your mouse cursor over the stream you want to watch, right-click and select Open in player and the stream will open in VLC.
Watching recorded content
You'll probably spend most of your time on the Recording tab in CTB Recorder. Once you've got that screen set up, you may rarely even look at CTB Recorder and can just go to the folder you configured recordings to be saved in and watch them as they magically appear.
One issue doing it this way is that while you can watch videos while they're being recorded, you won't be able to delete them if the recording is ongoing. You can get around this by having CTB Recorder [Pause All] (on the Recording tab) then [Resume All] if you're going to start watching stuff. [Of course, if you do that right when a pussy slip occurs, you'll miss it.]
Alternatively, right-click on one recording from the Recording tab (click on the heading Online or Recording to sort by that column then press the [End] key to get to the end of the list) then select Pause Recording. Repeat and select Resume Recording and now you'll be able to delete the recording you just watched. I do this so often that I wish there were an easier way to do it. It's a bit of a hassle to have to pause/resume every stream just to delete the file after you finish watching a recording. But you can always use the button at the top to Pause All if you get tired of doing it per stream. I just like to see what's going on in the stream before I pause/resume it, so I don't miss something good.
By pausing and resuming recordings, any huge files you watch won't be locked due to being open, so you'll be able to delete recordings to free up space once you're finished viewing. TIP: When you sort your Recording tab by the Online or Recording heading to group all of those together at the bottom (or top if sorted in reverse, just keep clicking the column to change the direction of the arrow), they'll end up unsorted after a while. CTB Recorder just adds new streams that come online to the top or bottom of the Recording tab if you've got it sorted by the Online heading, which is what I use the most often, to see who's online at any given time. I have many models paused from recording, so I like to see everyone who's online so I can see who I'm recording and who's paused.
But it becomes a mess after a while as new models come online and others go offline. To sort it again, just give a quick click on the heading Model to sort by model name, then again click the Online heading and everything will be sorted alphabetically by who's online and not.
You can also watch recordings by opening the Recordings tab. I find this to be a bit lacking because I usually open the folder CTB Recorder saves videos to (in Windows Explorer, not with CTB Recorder), skim through a bunch of typically tedious coy shows that belong on YouTube, delete the files to free up space ... and find that CTB Recorder hasn't removed the deleted recordings from the "Recordings" tab.
If you run into this, just exit CTB Recorder, restart it using your Desktop shortcut and the Recordings tab will refresh itself listing only the recordings that exist. You can then watch what you want by double-clicking on the Model or right-clicking and selecting Open in player. Press the [Del] key to delete a recording you're finished with or right-click and select Delete.
Notes
A nice touch with CTB Recorder is the ability to enter notes for each model. To do this, right-click on the model's name in the Recording or Recordings tab, then select Notes and enter what you like. The notes you enter on the Recording tab are maintained separately from notes you make (for the same model) on the Recordings tab. I'm not sure why, but that's how it is.
How to pause or resume recording a room
Open the Recording tab, click once on the model you wish to stop recording then click the [Pause Recording] button at the top just above the "Paused" heading.
Alternatively, right-click on the model's nickname and select Pause Recording from the context menu.
To resume recording, click the [Resume Recording] button at the top, or right-click on the model's name and select Resume Recording from the context menu.
Check URLs
On the Recording tab, to verify you haven't made any typos when setting up your URLs to record, click the [Check URLs] button at the top-right. CTB Recorder will now attempt to connect to each of the rooms and report any URLs it can't connect to. You can then fix your typos or otherwise notice that you entered the wrong site name or other problems before you miss shows you want to record.
If you've entered a bad URL or maybe the room has been banned, CTB Recorder will notify you of this with a dialog stating, "The following accounts seem to have been deleted. Do you want to remove them?"
It will then list the URL(s) it can't connect to and you might as well tell it to remove them, because there doesn't seem to be a way to edit URLs on the Recording tab. Just remove entries with typos and enter them again by pasting the proper URL in at the top beside "Model" then hitting the [Record] button just to the right.
How to stop recording a room
If you want to stop recording the shows in a room, right-click on the model (in the Recording tab), then select Stop recording. This will remove the entry of that model's account from the Recording tab but will preserve any Notes you had entered. To gain access to any Notes you had entered for a model you removed, just add her room's URL to the Recording tab again, then right-click and select Notes.
This demonstrates that CTB Recorder doesn't delete the models you instruct it to "Stop recording". It simply removes them from the Recording tab, which is a convenient way to pause recording for an extended period of time.
OPTIONAL
I use Media Player Classic (MPC) to view the recordings because I find it better than VLC.
How is MPC better? There's really no such thing as "better" in a grand sense. But strictly for viewing these kinds of videos, where little slips and "oopses" are the main fun, I like that I can define the left and right arrow keys to "Frame-step back" and "Frame-step" [forward]. In VLC, I can only find a way to set a hotkey for frame-step forward and not back.
I also like that MPC lets me access the video scroll bar in full-screen mode to move around in the video just by moving my mouse cursor near the bottom of the video I'm watching. In VLC I have to exit full screen to get at the video scrollbar.
Just tiny things but it's all there is between one media player and another: little things that suit one's needs better for a given task.
You thought that MPC development ended in 2017? See this: https://codecguide.com/media_player_classic.htm
You can get a copy of MPC, still under development along with the K-Lite Codec Pack, from
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases
Skip past "Development Build" (Pre-release) at the top of the github.com page linked above. Look for the green text stating (Latest) just below that. Under the text documenting the changes/fixes, you'll see the heading "Assets". Under that, download MPC-HC.[version].x64.exe then open it to install.
It's easy to set up and use but a little tutorial will be provided to get you started. There's no installer. Just unzip the downloaded archive into a folder wherever you like. I put mine in c:\ctbrec
Open the folder you unzipped to, right-click on ctbrec.exe then select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut). You can now start CTB Recorder using the shortcut on your Desktop and move that shortcut to wherever you want it.
Finally, free hidden shows?!
CTB Recorder will automatically record as many shows as you like whenever the room starts broadcasting. "Does it record private shows or ticket shows?" Of course not. If there is a way to do that, you won't read about it in an open forum free of charge. I've never heard of anything that bypasses the paywalls and CTB Recorder does not.
CTB Recorder records (or plays live in VLC) what you can watch for free because you have to pay to get hidden content. I have heard of bots that automate the recording of ticket shows and spy on privates, but not for free. The bots just tip automatically then probably call something like CTB Recorder to do the recording.
If you know about this, maybe you could write a tutorial here because there'd be more content to share if everyone had automated solutions.
Auto-start CTB Recorder
You can make CTB Recorder start automatically with Windows, so it automatically records whenever your PC is on, by pasting a copy of the Desktop shortcut you created above into this folder:
c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp\
That's the startup folder for "all users", meaning CTB Recorder will always auto-start whenever anyone logs into Windows. If you want to limit CTB Recorder so it only auto-starts when one user logs in, instead copy its shortcut to this folder:
c:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\
If you use the folder above, replace [USERNAME] with the Windows username you want CBT Recorder to auto-start with at login.
Setting up CTB Recorder for the first time
The first time you start CTB Recorder it'll take you right to the Settings tab. You can select a category of settings in the left pane while the pane on the right has the individual settings for each category. Following are the settings you're likely to change.
User Agent is what CTB Recorder reports to the different websites (such as Chaturbate.com) when it connects. It pretends to be Firefox for Linux (or Android on mobile) by default. That's fine even on Windows it doesn't matter, so just leave it at the default value. I think the author included this setting in case sites like Chaturbate.com start refusing to connect in the future. If that happens, it'll be simple for CTB Recorder to pretend its another web browser just by changing these strings.
Enable live previews (experimental) pops up a preview of the video feed you're watching (see below), if you have one open. I found the preview window to get in the way and I couldn't see how to move it, so I turned that off again. Try it and see if you like it. If not, just turn it back off.
Start Tab can be changed from "Settings" to "Recording" so that when CTB Recorder starts, it takes you right to the tab where recordings of different rooms are set up. There's no need to go to the Settings tab every time.
Start only one player at a time may also be unchecked, though I'm not sure why it's checked by default. CTB Recorder plays live streams in VLC (from streams inside tabs to the left like the "Chaturbate" tab). If you let it open multiple instances of VLC, you can have multiple streams open at once. If you leave this setting checked, when you open another stream, it will open in the same instance of VLC, meaning you'll only be able to have one stream open at a time.
I unchecked this, it works fine playing multiple streams in multiple instances of VLC and I haven't noticed any problems. If you do notice problems, set it back to its default value.
Where to store recordings
On the Recorder screen, change Recordings Directory to a location where you have lots of free space to store the recordings of shows. I tried "one directory for each model" in Directory Structure initially, but CTB Recorder uses filenames in the format:
Model_name_[date]_[time]
I found it just clutters things up to have different models stored in different folders but set this as you like.
I haven't changed anything else in this or any other category, so you should be good to go.
Recording shows
To set up a room to record, open the Recording tab.
At the top-left beside "Model", you can enter the room you wish to record in either of these formats:
Chaturbate:model_name
https://chaturbate.com/model_name (the URL)
Replace model_name with the model you want to record. For example:
Chaturbate:lilu_coy
https://chaturbate.com/coy_amina
How to watch live feeds
If you click on the CamSoda tab and some others and don't see any streams, it's likely because your VPN has been detected. Some of these sites make you shut your VPN down so they can use IP addresses as though they're photo ID that belong to a specific person they've banned.
Click on the Chaturbate tab in CTB Recorder.
You now see a reasonable facsimile of the home page at Chaturbate.com. To view a show in VLC, just double-click on the name of the room. (I find it a bit finicky to click on the video image itself. It works better to click on the text just below the video.) Alternatively, move your mouse cursor over the stream you want to watch, right-click and select Open in player and the stream will open in VLC.
Watching recorded content
You'll probably spend most of your time on the Recording tab in CTB Recorder. Once you've got that screen set up, you may rarely even look at CTB Recorder and can just go to the folder you configured recordings to be saved in and watch them as they magically appear.
One issue doing it this way is that while you can watch videos while they're being recorded, you won't be able to delete them if the recording is ongoing. You can get around this by having CTB Recorder [Pause All] (on the Recording tab) then [Resume All] if you're going to start watching stuff. [Of course, if you do that right when a pussy slip occurs, you'll miss it.]
Alternatively, right-click on one recording from the Recording tab (click on the heading Online or Recording to sort by that column then press the [End] key to get to the end of the list) then select Pause Recording. Repeat and select Resume Recording and now you'll be able to delete the recording you just watched. I do this so often that I wish there were an easier way to do it. It's a bit of a hassle to have to pause/resume every stream just to delete the file after you finish watching a recording. But you can always use the button at the top to Pause All if you get tired of doing it per stream. I just like to see what's going on in the stream before I pause/resume it, so I don't miss something good.
By pausing and resuming recordings, any huge files you watch won't be locked due to being open, so you'll be able to delete recordings to free up space once you're finished viewing. TIP: When you sort your Recording tab by the Online or Recording heading to group all of those together at the bottom (or top if sorted in reverse, just keep clicking the column to change the direction of the arrow), they'll end up unsorted after a while. CTB Recorder just adds new streams that come online to the top or bottom of the Recording tab if you've got it sorted by the Online heading, which is what I use the most often, to see who's online at any given time. I have many models paused from recording, so I like to see everyone who's online so I can see who I'm recording and who's paused.
But it becomes a mess after a while as new models come online and others go offline. To sort it again, just give a quick click on the heading Model to sort by model name, then again click the Online heading and everything will be sorted alphabetically by who's online and not.
You can also watch recordings by opening the Recordings tab. I find this to be a bit lacking because I usually open the folder CTB Recorder saves videos to (in Windows Explorer, not with CTB Recorder), skim through a bunch of typically tedious coy shows that belong on YouTube, delete the files to free up space ... and find that CTB Recorder hasn't removed the deleted recordings from the "Recordings" tab.
If you run into this, just exit CTB Recorder, restart it using your Desktop shortcut and the Recordings tab will refresh itself listing only the recordings that exist. You can then watch what you want by double-clicking on the Model or right-clicking and selecting Open in player. Press the [Del] key to delete a recording you're finished with or right-click and select Delete.
Notes
A nice touch with CTB Recorder is the ability to enter notes for each model. To do this, right-click on the model's name in the Recording or Recordings tab, then select Notes and enter what you like. The notes you enter on the Recording tab are maintained separately from notes you make (for the same model) on the Recordings tab. I'm not sure why, but that's how it is.
How to pause or resume recording a room
Open the Recording tab, click once on the model you wish to stop recording then click the [Pause Recording] button at the top just above the "Paused" heading.
Alternatively, right-click on the model's nickname and select Pause Recording from the context menu.
To resume recording, click the [Resume Recording] button at the top, or right-click on the model's name and select Resume Recording from the context menu.
Check URLs
On the Recording tab, to verify you haven't made any typos when setting up your URLs to record, click the [Check URLs] button at the top-right. CTB Recorder will now attempt to connect to each of the rooms and report any URLs it can't connect to. You can then fix your typos or otherwise notice that you entered the wrong site name or other problems before you miss shows you want to record.
If you've entered a bad URL or maybe the room has been banned, CTB Recorder will notify you of this with a dialog stating, "The following accounts seem to have been deleted. Do you want to remove them?"
It will then list the URL(s) it can't connect to and you might as well tell it to remove them, because there doesn't seem to be a way to edit URLs on the Recording tab. Just remove entries with typos and enter them again by pasting the proper URL in at the top beside "Model" then hitting the [Record] button just to the right.
How to stop recording a room
If you want to stop recording the shows in a room, right-click on the model (in the Recording tab), then select Stop recording. This will remove the entry of that model's account from the Recording tab but will preserve any Notes you had entered. To gain access to any Notes you had entered for a model you removed, just add her room's URL to the Recording tab again, then right-click and select Notes.
This demonstrates that CTB Recorder doesn't delete the models you instruct it to "Stop recording". It simply removes them from the Recording tab, which is a convenient way to pause recording for an extended period of time.
OPTIONAL
I use Media Player Classic (MPC) to view the recordings because I find it better than VLC.
How is MPC better? There's really no such thing as "better" in a grand sense. But strictly for viewing these kinds of videos, where little slips and "oopses" are the main fun, I like that I can define the left and right arrow keys to "Frame-step back" and "Frame-step" [forward]. In VLC, I can only find a way to set a hotkey for frame-step forward and not back.
I also like that MPC lets me access the video scroll bar in full-screen mode to move around in the video just by moving my mouse cursor near the bottom of the video I'm watching. In VLC I have to exit full screen to get at the video scrollbar.
Just tiny things but it's all there is between one media player and another: little things that suit one's needs better for a given task.
You thought that MPC development ended in 2017? See this: https://codecguide.com/media_player_classic.htm
You can get a copy of MPC, still under development along with the K-Lite Codec Pack, from
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases
Skip past "Development Build" (Pre-release) at the top of the github.com page linked above. Look for the green text stating (Latest) just below that. Under the text documenting the changes/fixes, you'll see the heading "Assets". Under that, download MPC-HC.[version].x64.exe then open it to install.
