A SourceForge community member asked a great question recently in our forums:
“I need to record video streams. I’ve looked at several projects here but they seem to be geared toward a PVR stand-in. I’m looking for a simple app [like] Audacity for video…..Vidacity??”
Other forum members had some terrific recommendations and I thought I’d poke around a little more to see what else I could come up with.
Virtual VCR lets you capture audio and video streams right to your hard drive in .avi format using a tv tuner and video capture cards with WDM drivers. Its developers recommend using an MJPEG codec to compress the video during capture for fast, high-quality downloads. Virtual VCR lets you change channels right from the keyboard, detect dropped frames, and even set up a timed capture so you can record things when you’re away from the computer.
MP4LIVE is an option for capturing video on a Linux box. It encodes audio and video in real-time then writes to .mp4, and can even transmit to a network simultaneously. The app has thorough documentation and its developers have taken the time to offer several tips and suggestions to make using MP4LIVE as easy as possible. They also note that thought the native mpeg-4 encoder no longer works and recommend ffmpeg or xvid instead.
CamStudio records your computer screen and audio activity, then converts it into a Streaming Flash video (SWF). This project is a bit of a “work in progress” but it has a storied history and is actually a derivative of a program that ended up in the hands of Macromedia.
While it won’t work for video capture, Streamripper is a great app for capturing MP3 or Vorbis Internet radio streams from Web sites like Shoutcast and LastFM. Available for Win32, OS X, and Unix.