streaming and saving live video
January 17, 2011 8:52 PM   Subscribe

I need to record one of these broadcast feeds tomorrow morning (PDF link). What's the best way to go about this? I'm on a Mac, and I won't be home when it begins. How much hard drive space should I have available?
posted by avocet to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
VLC (videolan.org) could do it, I'm sure, but it's not the simplest thing to configure for the novice. You could probably muck around with cron or Automator to kick it off at the right time, but it would be simpler to just let it run and then trim the video down after.

Although it occurs to me, you may not be able to leave it run if the streams aren't already running. In that case, you'd need something like a BASH script that would keep re-trying every minute or something.
posted by Rat Spatula at 10:36 PM on January 17, 2011


How much hard drive space should I have available?

Back of envelope estimate is a little under 10 Megs per minute.

The PDF says that the primary feed is 640x480 1024Kbps video + 96k Audio.
(1024+96) kbits per second/8 bits in a byte = 140 kilobytes per second.
140 KBytes per second * 60 seconds / 1024 KB in a Megabyte = 8.750 Megabytes per minute.

Add 10% for container overhead and other excessive bits, or just to be on the safe side.
posted by toxic at 11:12 PM on January 17, 2011


I use Audio Hijack Pro myself. It can work in tandem with a media player of your choice to record sometihng on a timer. However, it is not cheap, and a minute or two or practice wouldn't hurt (play with the free demo first, then if it works, buy the unlock code).
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:49 AM on January 18, 2011


I found this on the VLC forum.. It lets you schedule a recording of a stream at any time. It is not a GUI based solution but it looks simple enough. May need to read up a bit. If that scares you it looks like there is a non free option which seems to have a built in scheduler.
posted by Raff at 3:38 AM on January 18, 2011


I use Audio Hijack Pro too and it's great for recording from any source on my Mac. I use it a lot for delaying audio feeds to sync with TV broadcasts by playing the file with VLC as it's being recorded by AHP.

You can easily set the quality / size of recordings.
posted by i_cola at 6:55 AM on January 18, 2011


Ah...you want video too. Oops.
posted by i_cola at 7:01 AM on January 18, 2011


Response by poster: So the funeral was delayed long enough for me to get home and get the recording started myself...then my connection crapped out! Thanks for all of your suggestions.
posted by avocet at 11:50 AM on January 18, 2011


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