I got a couple cheap, IP webcams for home security application. The webcams work fine, but I am looking for a lightweight (not Motion or Zoneminder) way to record, not monitor, the stream on my Ubuntu/Mythbuntu box. And then transcode and/or playback the files only if there was any problems/vandalism. 99.9% of the time, I don't expect to review the files, so I don't want to waste a lot of CPU time recording.

So, far I have cron jobs set up to record the camera stream (reportedly mjpg format), timestamp, and rotate the logs.

Since the cameras have a built in webserver, I can use:
wget http://192.168.0.XXX:80/video.cgi?user=username\pwd=password -O timestamped_file_name.mjpg to record the stream, and it records without error.

The output file only seems to playback on mplayer (but not gmplayer).

However,
wget http://192.168.0.XXX:80/video.cgi?us...\&pwd=password -O - | vlc -
puts live video on the screen and reports the codec as mjpg; but vlc fails to play the saved file as an input file (vlc only plays the first frame and closes). Not sure why streaming works, but the file fails.


Any ideas (mencoder?, ffmpeg?) on more versatile playback (or ways to transcode the stream to a more standardized format to make playback easier and a more compatible format)?

It's likely that someone has solved this likely trivial problem before, but it is not clearly found by searching.