Recording Video

[Ian Davidson]

Please can you advise me.

I am attempting to record audio/video which I expect to last up to 1½ 
hours.  If I try to do that as one single file, storing as AVI, I get a 
file which is over 2GB and that causes problems.  Therefore, I like to 
record 3 shorter videos - and in the past I have manually stopped the 
recording at a 'convenient point' and started a new recording - keeping 
each recording to a maximum of 40 minutes.

An alternative approach would be to record for a certain time and then 
automatically stop and start a new recording.  This would mean that the 
recording break would probably come when someone was speaking, so there 
would be a little 'hiccup'.  I wrote the script below to see how much of 
a gap there was between successive recordings (the camera was pointing 
at a digital clock showing seconds).  The videos did not turn out quite 
as I expected.


#!/bin/bash
fileNamePart="${HOME}/video"
v4l2-ctl -i 1
counter=0
while [ $counter -lt 3 ]; do
     let counter=counter+1
     fullFileName="${fileNamePart}-${counter}.avi"
     gst-launch-1.0 -e v4l2src norm=PAL num-buffers=100 ! 
'video/x-raw,format=(string)I420,width=352,height=288,framerate=(fraction)25/1' 
! queue ! mux. alsasrc num-buffers=440 ! audioconvert ! 
'audio/x-raw,rate=44100,channels=2' ! queue ! mux. avimux name=mux ! 
filesink location="$fullFileName"
done

It would appear that video-1 was fine.  Video-2 then started and there 
was a slight break in the audio from the end of video-1. However, the 
video content of video-2 has a 4 second gap in the middle of the clip.

I assume that the 2 sources v4l2src and alsasrc are each set to produce 
the nominated number of buffers - and that's what they are going to do.  
The fact that one source has produced an EOS (I assume) does not stop 
the other.

Would I be correct in assuming that, if I wrote a C program, rather than 
using gst-launch, I would be able close both sources down at a time that 
suited me?  And also that I cannot do it using gst-launch?

Thanks

Ian

By the way, thanks to those who have already got me this far.
-- 
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Ian Davidson
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