Capture video from vlc command line with a stop time

Question

I'm trying to capture a video from an RPT stream to my pc (Ubuntu 12-04 LTS). I'm using vlc from command line as below:

cvlc -vvv rtp://address:port --start-time=00 --stop-time=300 --sout file/ts:test.ts

but vlc ignores the command --stop-time and it continues to download video even more than 300 seconds as specified.

Does anyone know the reason for this? and a possible solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you know the start-time and the end-time you can compute the record time. You can afterward use the --run-time option to get what you want, like this: cvlc --run-time 60 --start-time 1260 /Path/to/your/file.ts vlc://quit

Answer 2

Yes, this is a limitation of the stop-time option. It only works with streams with a known length. As captured video doesn't have this information as it is live (or more precisely, the capture access module don't even try to add said information), the option won't work.

Patches are certainly welcome and sorry for the limitation.

Answer 3

I tried vlc to record a webcam for a specific period. I ended up using the timeout command:

timeout <seconds>s vlc v4l2:///dev/video1

In Ubuntu it's available without any installation