What software can I use to record audio/video off a foscam IP camera?

Question

I have an IP camera foscam, I am trying to setup a software on my server that can continuously record video and audio. Which software should I use?

Answer 1

Both VLC and avconv work splendidly.

Try this:

avconv -i 'http://IP:PORT/videostream.asf?user=x&pwd=x&resolution=32' -t 3600 -c:a libmp3lame out.avi

..to record one hour video. You can use this in a small shell script to rotate hourly video files over time. Under Ubuntu, make sure you install ubuntu-restricted-extras for the proper codecs.

Answer 2

I had good results with Foscams using Zoneminder. FYI, it uses quite a bit of resources.

Answer 3

Under Linux I have found GStreamer incredibly powerful in the work I have been recently doing. It has a variety of plug-ins that can be used to capture, manipulate, transcode, etc. It is included in the package management repositories of all major Linux distributions I have encountered, although it may come as a series of different packages (Good, Bad Ugly) due to licensing issues.

It is a little daunting to use at first, when using it from the command line it operates on a pipeline basis similar to the console itself. For example the following pipeline would capture video from a webcam and save it as a H264 encoded MKV file.

gst-launch v4l2src ! x264enc ! matroskamux ! filesink location=webcam.mkv

Now clearly the pipelines vary depending on your exact circumstance, but some general rules ring true - such as you always need at-least one source and sink and generally if you have encoded a video you will also want to mux it.

Edit: I should also note that it has a C SDK for those who wish to use it as part of a C/C++ application as I have.

Answer 4

My Foscam camera can record video/audio itself and send it to an FTP server, provided it has an SD card inserted. It uses the ASF format.