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Hello all.
I was wondering if any one could suggest of a way to schedule a recording from a webcam on a local machine.
for example I want my webcam to start recording video at say 7am and stop at 8am.
The webcam is working and all is set properly, I have wxcam which has a feature to record but I found nothing about scheduling for auto start and auto stop.
I was thinking using 'at' but I found nothing about command line for wxcam.
Again, alter the settings as you see fit. As you can see, this one includes audio. I just grabbed these commands off the net somewhere a while back, so they probably aren't optimal.
Then you can wrap it in a simple script and use timeout to stop the recording after a set length of time. (mencoder also certainly has a built-in recording time option somewhere, but I don't feel like digging through the man page to find it.)
But wow, I was just looking at some of my plants thinking "How cool would it be to have my web-cam take a photo at the same time every day and then render it into a video.
Now I think I have the tools to go ahead (I don't need timeout, but thats an interesting one which I'd never heard of)
Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat...err, to schedule a recording. I just posted the first one that came to my head. A bit of searching should turn up more.
Like I said, I just pulled the command off the web, so I can't comment on whether it's appropriate for you as-is. It works just fine with my LogiCool webcam.
I do get most of the same "errors" that you do, except for this one.
Code:
FPS not specified in the header or invalid, use the -fps option.
No stream found.
Perhaps your cam doesn't present the right framerate information to the system or something. Try adding something like -fps 30 to the command, like it suggests. Try changing the frame size values too.
Incidentally, for some reason vlc fails to open my device when I use v4l2, but it works just fine if I specify it as v4l. Strange.
I'm not very experienced with mplayer, as I usually use ffmpeg for my media work. But it's my understanding that mplayer is mostly only capable of saving simple stream dumps and the like, and that you really need to use mencoder for more advanced transformations. mplayer -vo help doesn't show me any output types that would be useful for advanced video. But the same -fps 15 should work with mencoder as well.
As I see it, the basic mencoder syntax isn't all that difficult. You specify the video and audio codecs you want to use with -ovc and -oac, then depending on what you've entered, you also add secondary options to control the various codec parameters. Here are a couple of pages that seem to cover the basics well:
Well, for one thing, you still haven't added -fps to the command. mencoder will certainly need the same input options that mplayer uses. They're just the playing and encoding modules of the same program after all.
I don't see why you should give up so easily. Now that you know for sure that mplayer works, all you need to do is find the proper parameters to use. The links I provided in my last post should be enough for you to figure it out.
Right I forgot the -fps part but it doesn't make mencoder work so it must be something else.
I'll read the links in depth when I have the chance.
again thank you for your help.
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