recording video/pics from webcam

Skaperen · 06-07-2011, 03:48 PM

I have a USB webcam connected to a server (dmesg output below). It is currently running Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS server edition. So it has no X, and I don't want to install any. What I am looking for is a command line program to capture video from this webcam and store it. Also, something that can capture just pictures would be nice (but once I have a video file, I know how to get individual pictures from that). A nice plus would be setting this up as a video stream for other computers to stream the video from (to do what they can do with a stream, like view it in real time, capture individual pictures, save it). If setting up a stream makes the capture part easier, I could go for that.

This camera works in the cheese GUI program on a desktop. Colors are bad in bright lights, but then, it's a cheap camera.

I prefer the output/stream in a free/libre video format (vp8/webm, ogg/theora, or dirac), but other formats that Linux software exists for (to record and play) can work if the free ones can't be done.

Google finds lots of GUI ways to do this (mostly references to cheese). I did find one page that suggests "mencoder". But it doesn't find this webcam.

I found a camera stream server called "camserv". It seems to find this camera, but then freezes. When I start camserv, the camera's blue light goes off, but no video is ever delivered from a web page reference. When I stop it, the camera is in an unusable state and has to be unplugged to reset it (so it can be used with "cheese").

So I'm looking for other software.

Code:

[1805518.412294] usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
[1805518.955647] 5:3:1: cannot get freq at ep 0x84
[1805518.965047] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[1805518.978527] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[1805518.989915] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device VF0380 Live! Cam Optia Pro (041e:4065)
[1805518.997000] input: VF0380 Live! Cam Optia Pro as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input4
[1805518.997051] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[1805518.997053] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

smoker · 06-07-2011, 04:03 PM

I had a set up where an IP cam fed mjpeg images to my server running ffserver and ffmpeg. I had it outputting to flash (!) but you can specify anything with ffmpeg.

How you interface to a USB camera is beyond my expertise, but if it's linked directly to the "server" it should be straightforward.

Here is the basic outline of what I did.

Skaperen · 06-07-2011, 04:50 PM

If I could get ffmepg or ffserver to find my webcam, things could probably work from there. Cheese seems to be using /dev/video0 with Video4Linux, and it works. But camserv does, too, and it fails. Maybe it's just a flaky version of the video driver.