What’s Periscope?
Periscope is Twitter’s live-streaming video app that allows you to share and experience live broadcasts from around the world on your smartphone or tablet. Periscopers broadcast themselves or live events and users can interact with them by leaving text comments or “pumping hearts” to show their love. The broadcasts are generally available for up to 24 hours before they disappear, but can vanish even more quickly if the broadcaster decides to delete their video. That’s where Snagscope can help.
Why do I need Snagscope?
Snagscope is a capture utility for Periscope broadcasts. It lets you record LIVE Periscope broadcasts (as well as replays), and save them to a local file on your device, so that you can replay them at your leisure. Similar apps already exist like Scopedown, Downloader for Periscope, and PeriDownload, but these apps don’t allow you to capture LIVE broadcasts. You need to first wait for the broadcast to complete. Then you can attempt to download it, but if the broadcaster is quick to delete their video, your download will fail. Snagscope is superior because it captures the video as it’s being broadcast, so you don’t lose anything. And it allows you to run multiple recordings at the same time, so you won’t miss a broadcast because you were busy watching another.
How do I use it?
Snagscope is currently only available on Android. You can download it in the Google Play Store. Once it’s installed, you can capture Periscope broadcasts using the procedure below.
1) Open Periscope and view a broadcast that you would like to record.
2) From the slide up menu, click on “SHARE BROADCAST” and select “Copy URL”.
3) Go to your home screen and open the Snagscope app.
4) Click on the “Paste URL” button, followed by the “Snag It” button.
5) The broadcast is now being recorded. You can monitor its progress, or return to Periscope to watch more broadcasts and snag more videos. Once the capture completes, you can save it to your file system.
6) By default, the captures are converted to MP4 files and saved into the Downloads directory, but this is all configurable from the Settings tab.
Another feature of Snagscope is that you can stop (pause) and resume a recording as many times as you like before saving it to file. Anything broadcast while the recording is stopped will not be saved. This can be useful for lengthy broadcasts, where you are only interested in specific parts of the broadcast. Once you have saved your capture data to an output file, you can delete the recording data. The recording data is only necessary if you plan to resume your capture.
By default, Snagscope will attempt to save your captures as MP4 files, but if the video encoder is not available for your device, it will default to MPEG-TS. If you run into problems viewing the MP4 output file, try changing the output file format from MP4 to MPEG-TS in the Settings tab.
You can watch a video demonstration of Snagscope here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2vryIke9Ew
We hope you find our app useful. If you do, please consider giving us a fair review in the Google Play Store. If you don’t find it useful or you have suggestions on how we can improve it, feel free to email your comments to us at snagscope@iqtecture.com.
Enjoy, and happy snagging!
Snagscope is not a product of Periscope or Twitter and not affiliated with these organizations in any way. Note that sharing broadcasts without author consent is against Periscope policy. Please respect others rights and do not share captured videos without the authors permission.
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