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6 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Recording video from cron using VLC
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15 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
23 <div class=
"title">Recording video from cron using VLC
</div>
24 <div class=
"date"> 5th April
2009</div>
25 <div class=
"body"><p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
26 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net. The
27 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
28 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
29 vlc. I finally found a way to do it today. I spent an hour or so
30 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation. The
31 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
32 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:
</p>
34 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
36 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
37 --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
38 --intf=dummy
</pre></blockquote>
40 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
41 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
42 dummy interface. The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
43 sure no X interface is needed.
</p>
45 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
46 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
47 the vlc process with SIGTERM. Here is a complete script
48 <tt>vlc-record
</tt> to use from
<tt>at
</tt> or
<tt>cron
</tt>:
</p>
50 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
55 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
56 --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
57 --intf=dummy < /dev/null
> /dev/null
2>&
1 &
61 wait $pid
</pre></blockquote>
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