Reccoding video for security application

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:22:31 +0700 (ICT)
Olivier Nicole <on at cs.ait.ac.th> wrote:

> > > I have a bktr848 video capture card in the machine and I would like to
> > > reccord video and save it in a decent format (something that could
> > > easily be played on most movie player on Windows and X, xvid, mpeg,
> > > etc.) in the full 640x480 resolution.
> > > 
> > > I have been playing around with fxtv and dtv and transcode and...
> > 
> > 	Try ffmpeg - I used it as a VCR for a long time, mencoder should
> > also work well and provides the very low CPU option of using nuv
> > (Nuppelvideo) format recording.
> 
> I tries ffmpeg, but it core dumps both on /dev/bktr and on the file
> reccorded with dtv.

	That's a pain, ffmpeg is a nice little tool when it hasn't been
broken. It might be worthwhile seeing if you can find an older package of
it and try that.

> Mencode has so many options, I don't know how to run it.

	Most of them have to do with specifying the output format and
encodings (it does support rather a lot of them).

	Start with something like this

	mencoder tv:// -tv driver=bsdbt848:norm=PAL:input=0 -ovc lavc
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400 -oac 'mp3lame' -lameopts br=128
out.avi

	You may need to specify a different input depending on where your
camera is plugged in and how the board is wired. You might want NTSC or
SECAM instead of PAL. You can fiddle endlessly with the lavcopts trading
off quality, size and CPU utilisation.

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