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