Use of ffmpeg, to make mpeg video and audio with linux.
Use of ffmpeg, to make mpeg video and audio with linux.
Use of ffmpeg, to make mpeg video and audio with linux.
Use of ffmpeg, to make mpeg video and audio with linux.
Use of ffmpeg, to make mpeg video and audio with linux.

How I video record under linux. BTW, if you have suggestions
that I find work, I will be HAPPY to include them right here. 

First, the card: Pinnacle PCTV Studio PCI card.
This is kinda generic, uses the bt8x8 chipset series (critical)
Pretty inexpensive, works.

Next, the setup. Analog video into the video port (composite,
or S-Video) and audio into the sound card.

Build the bttv driver. RTFM. I use kernel 2.4.17. Add the
insmod option gbuffers=32. This gives you about 64 Mbytes of
buffer space. If you have a lot of ram you could set it to 64
instead. This will control how well you can capture. Once you
overrun the buffer with raw video, it is all over - you are
dropping frames. Video4linux2 will compensate for that by time
marking frames, but no dice yet. Bigger buffers is always
better. The audio goes into the sound card.

Now, the software. First, use xawtv. Make sure you can see the
video, and the driver loads OK, etc. You can take a JPEG
snapshot using xawtv, or stream a REALLY huge AVI file that can
be played with xanim. Resize the window and click on record
video - this will give you the pixel size. Resize again and
notice that it prefers a few sizes. Try to use these later. Now
that you know your video card and audio work, and you know
preferred video sizes, quit xawtv.

Now, use ffmpeg. Here is the command line I use
ffmpeg -t 15 -b 1000 -s 320x240 -ad /dev/dsp -ar 22050
/tmp/foo.mpg

15 seconds of mpeg1 taking a little more than 2 MBytes for the
file. This uses ffmpeg defaults of MPEG1 audio (mp3) and video.
This also uses the default of 25 frames per second ( as if the
command line arguments " -r 25 " were used). I use 30 for surfing
MPEGs - more faster action.

This is a pretty decent quality MPEG. You can also use the
options -ar 22050 and -ac 1 to set the audio sampling lower and
use 1 channel - you probably won't notice a loss.. 

YOU MAY DROP FRAMES. For the above command line, there should
be 374 frames (time in seconds * 25 - 1). If not, you need to
back off a little. Do it from a console instead of X (kill X
too) and see if that helps. Reduce the bitrate (-b 300 nearly
always works - this is a crappier MPEG image). Reduce the size
some. Play with it, and see what works.

Some people stream to separate raw video files and audio
wav files, and then reconstruct. I couldn't get this going, and
the above worked, so, well, that is that.

I also use
ffmpeg -t 15 -vcodec rv10 -s 256x192 -ad /dev/dsp /tmp/foo.rm

This is a RealPlayer codec 1.0 file. It works. It is low
quality. Anyone can view it, and that is a bonus under linux. 
I cannot get higher resolutions to work for me.

Bttvgrab and bttvconvert are other useful utilities for video
capture. You may try mplayer for playback - I find it is pretty
good. 

Hope this helps. 

dave AT blakestah DOT com