Open Source Linux Video Capture Software

Matroska is an open standard audio/video container format. Visit our homepage at http://www.matroska.org

OBS Studio, also known as Open Broadcaster Software, is a free and open source software program for live streaming and video recording. Features of the software include device/source capture, recording, encoding and broadcasting. Stream on Windows, Mac or Linux. This software is commonly used by video game streamers on the popular streaming platform Twitch.

libdc1394 is a library that provides a high level programming interface for application developers who wish to control and capture streams from IEEE 1394 based cameras that conform to the 1394-based Digital Camera Specifications (also known as the IIDC or DCAM Specifications). libdc1394 also supports some USB cameras that are IIDC compliant. Besides capture and control, libdc1394 provides a full set of colour space conversion functions (including RAW decoding), vendor specific functions and direct camera register access. Keywords: ieee1394, IIDC, DCAM, firewire, USB, machine vision, computer vision, video capture, library

Mjpeg tools is a suite of programs which support video capture, editing, playback, and compression to MPEG of MJPEG video. Edit, play and compression software is hardware independent. Capture supports MJPEG hardware (Buz,DC10+ etc). and V4l2 devices.

This software writes short movies with your digital DSLR camera Canon (R) directly to computer. The camera must have LiveView feature to work, like in Canon EOS 450D for example. The Program has preview, Av, Tv and WB control.

A fast closed captions extractor for MPEG and H264 files. Supports DVD, HDTV transport streams, Replay TV. Use this to create .srt (subtitles) files for your TV captures, have transcripts so you can edit subtitles, etc. This project has moved to its own domain: https://www.ccextractor.org Files in sourceforge are left for archival purposes, but new releases will be available from ccextractor.org.

Tvheadend is a TV streaming server and digital video recorder for Linux. It supports DVB-C(2), DVB-T(2), DVB-S(2), ATSC, SAT>IP, HDHomeRun and IPTV inputs, as well as HTTP, HTSP (own protocol) and SAT>IP outputs.

AcidRip is an automated front end for MPlayer/Mencoder written in Perl, using Gtk2::Perl for a graphical interface. Makes encoding a DVD just one button click!

NOTE: Project migrated to GitHub in Dec 2020! See https://github.com/Enselic/recordmydesktop recordMyDesktop is a program that captures audio-video data of a linux desktop session, producing an ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file. recordMyDesktop tries to be as unobstrusive as possible by proccessing only regions of the screen that have changed

PortMedia was created to develop and share cross-platform, open-source I/O libraries for digital media including MIDI, video, and audio. Only a few things were released under the PortMedia umbrella. These are now hosted by the github.com/Portmidi/ project, where you can find the lastest versions of PortMidi, portsmf (Standard MIDI File support and more), and see github.com/rbdannenberg/scorealign for MIDI and/or Audio score alignment.

xvidcap is a screen capture enabling you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes. It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

TaniDVR is a CLI tool for managing and capturing video from Linux-based OEM surveillance DVRs which use DVR-IP protocol (p: 37777/TCP). It has been tested with Intelbras DVRs and is expected to work with brands such as DVR365, Q-See, GWave and other.

TV Scheduling service that allows timed captures of Digital TV to your hard drive using a digital tuner device. (DVB-T BDA)

Videoder is a tool that allows you to search for any video you want using a personalized search engine that combs through different streaming video services like YouTube, Vimeo, and others, so that you can then download them directly to your Android device.

Bloom is an open-source, agent-centric video recording and processing platform designed as a modern alternative to tools like Loom, but with a strong emphasis on AI-driven workflows and programmability. It allows users to record sessions locally while simultaneously preparing those recordings to be processed, indexed, and analyzed by AI systems, effectively turning simple screen captures into structured, queryable data. The project is part of the broader VideoDB ecosystem, which focuses on giving AI agents perception and memory through video, enabling them to understand and act upon visual information. Bloom supports the concept of “agentic video,” where recordings are not just passive media files but interactive assets that can be searched, summarized, and transformed into workflows or insights. This makes it particularly useful for use cases such as debugging AI agents, documenting processes, training models, or creating automated video-based reports.

A universal control panel for Video for Linux Two (V4L2) devices.

Coriander is a full-featured GUI for IEEE1394, IIDC-compliant digital cameras.

5dpo Component Library for Lazarus (Sdpo) provides a comport (serial port) component, an UVC video driver component for webcams, a Gtk fast painting form and a Joystick component.

An application for capturing images to generate timelapse videos, built on gPhoto2 and wxWidgets libraries.

A webcam application. It supports video recording (avi uncompressed format), snapshot taking, and some special commands for philips webcams.

Flash Extractor allows you to view, convert to, and extract from Flash files. It is essentially an elaborate combination of multiple open source libraries and applications. For details, please see: http://flashextractor.sourceforge.net/

TV-Viewer is a frontend to watch and record TV. Designed for analog TV-cards working with ivtv, pvrusb2 or cx18 driver and others with a build-in hardware MPEG-2 encoder. The Gui is written in Tk, so it does not rely on a special desktop environment.

The Integrating Vision Toolkit (IVT) is a powerful and fast C++ computer vision library with an easy-to-use object-oriented architecture. It offers its own multi-platform GUI toolkit. OpenCV is integrated optionally. Website: http://ivt.sourceforge.net

Flazr is a Java implementation of protocols such as RTMP used for multimedia streaming. The Flazr project includes a streaming media server and related utilities.