Re: Please suggest a video capture software

["Santanu Chatterjee" <thisissantanu@gmail.com>]

On 7/29/06, Santanu Chatterjee <thisissantanu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/22/06, Bruno Buys <bruno.grupos@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > .....
> > All the pieces are there, already: v4l2 supplies the video
> > stream, codecs are thriving over the internet, the author would only
> > have to redirect the stream to both X and a file, after encoding. Am I
> > very wrong about that?

>  I wish I could just 'cat' from /dev/video0 and use 'tee'.

Bruno, I was feeling crazy yesterday, and tried the following:
------------------------------
streamer -o /dev/stdout -t  1:00 -r 25 -f mjpeg -F mono16 \
   -d /dev/video0 | tee test.avi | mplayer -
------------------------------
mplayer showed me the choppiest video I have ever seen and
test.avi ended up with 33MB of junk (no video stream detected by
mplayer).  I had read before but now I know why simple pipes don't
work for video streaming :-)

Well, currently, I am using tvtime to view TV, and
when I need to record something, I run a simple shell script to close tvtime
and record the video for the specified amount of time. The script uses streamer
to do the capture. I tried your mencoder line, as well as a number of variations
of the same (using oss as well as alsa for audio capture), but mencoder/mplayer
does not capture audio at all in my case!  So I settled on streamer.
Although I cannot
'see' what I am capturing, streamer does play the audio, which gives
me a hint....
this is probably what you mentioned in one of your mails.

The script I am using is as simple as
( i am writing the script from memory):
------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
# "vidcap.sh"
# usage: vidcap.sh <filename.avi> <time>

killall -9 tvtime
amixer -c 0 sset Line,0 90,90 unmute cap 2>/dev/null
streamer -o $1 -t $2 -r 25 -f mjpeg -F mono16 -d /dev/video0
tvtime &
-------------------------------------

I am getting interested about learning the v4l2 API. So, maybe
someday I might just code something....

At the moment, I am looking at:
-------------------
http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/VideoForLinuxLoopbackDeviceFeedTestPackage
-------------------
...might turn out to be something I am looking for.

Regards,
Santanu