It has often been stated that great utilities should do exactly one thing,
and do that very well. Do you know any great utilities for recording from
a V4L(2) device? Please do not hesitate to tell me if it already exists.
(If you are tired of non-programmers whining for this or that program or
feature, this message may not be for you. Sorry.)
There are a number of solutions for recording video from a v4l device
to be found. Most of them appear to have a shitload of dependencies on
other pieces of software in various states of maturity, and most often
have a user-interface and/or documentation which I'd rather not describe
in a civilized forum.
In short, the existing offers very much reflect how much i paid for them.
I'd like to have a piece of software that:
- reads audio and video and
- compress the input to mp3/mpeg-4 while keeping audio and video in sync.
- will require one preinstalled audio and video codec and a v4l2-device.
- does de-interlacing
- has built-in defaults for all options.
- is installed with './configure; make install'
- creates content which is viewable with common software
All other requirements should be strictly optional.
(Excluding obvious omissions.)
I cooked up a man-page, if anyone feels like taking on the task.
It may reveal my total lack of understanding of the subject at hand, but
it should also reflect the level of simplicity I'd like to see.
Your reward for coding this will be an eternal stream of requests for
new features in v4l2record, and almost as much fame, glory and spam as
Gerd Knorr is getting. :-)
Regards,
Dag B.
NAME
v4l2record - record audio and/or video from OSS/V4L2 devices.
SYNOPSIS
v4l2record [ options ]
DESCRIPTION
v4l2record reads audio and/or video data from a OSS device and
a V4L2 device, and writes the compressed data to a file. A limited
number of output formats are supported.
OPTIONS
All commandline options can also be set in $HOME/.v4l2record or
/etc/v4l2record. Commandline options overrule $HOME/.v4l2record,
and $HOME/.v4l2record overrules /etc/v4l2record.
All commandline options have a default value. Use -v 2 to see the
default values.
-a <device>,[ stereo | mono8 | mono16 ],[ 11 | 22 | 32 | 44 ]
set OSS audiodevice, audio capture format and sampling frequency
use device=NULL for no audio
-d <device>,[ 422 | 411 ],[ n ],[ XxY ]
set V4L device, video capture format, framerate and resolution
-s [ mp3 | ogg ],[ n ]
set output audiocodec and bitrate in kbps
-c [ mp4 | mp1 ],[ n ]
set output videocodec and bitrate in kbps
-i [ none | type1 | type2 | type3 ]
set de-interlacing method.
-o <file>
set outputfile
-v [ 0 | 1 | 2 ]
verbose mode, 0=quiet, 1=normal, 2=debug.
-t <time>
seconds to capture
-p <profile>
get codecs/devices/formats/resolution/deinterl. from config file entry
Additional codec options need a way to be handled....
REQUIREMENTS
v4l2record requires a v4l2 device, xvid version foo and lame version
bar.
Real-time encoding of mpeg-4 requires some processor power.
A <processor X> at <clockrate Y> should be able to encode
a resolution of <Z> in real-time. YMMV.
