The problem with streaming video and audio (music and radio) is that there’s no way to access it offline. Jaksta – or Jaksta Streaming Media Recorder to give it its full name – offers a simple solution: once installed and configured, it’ll sit silently in the background as you surf the web as normal. The moment it detects a supported stream it’ll instantly download it and convert it to an offline-friendly format, all in the background.

It’s as simple or as complicated to use as you want it to be. You can simply use it to download the file in its original format from the supported site – Jaksta works with all popular streams and protocols including Flash (FLV), HTTP, RMTP and IceCast, so it should work with popular streaming sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion. It’s also to be browser independent, so should work with all major browsers with no issues.

Once downloaded you can leave it in its original format, or convert it for playback on another device. Just choose your desired format or device from the dropdown menu – a large number of presets covering most popular devices are covered. Then just leave the program to get on with the job.

The demo version allows you to download and convert full YouTube video clips, but it’ll only download up to 50 per cent of other on-demand audio and video clips, or one minute of live streams. Upgrade to the Standard version to remove these limitations, or pay a little extra for the Pro version which features an Audio Recorder for recording MP3 files from any site, an offline cache viewer of content you’ve previously played and automatic MP3 identification and tagging.