preview video while ffmpeg is recording

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

mplayer might work better than vlc for your buffering issues[1].
There's even options to control the buffer size if you need to.

I would suggest Alsa or PulseAudio instead of OSS (I've always had
issues with OSS, esp crackling/etc in audio at times), but it looks
like ffmpeg might not support Alsa.[2]

My suggestion would be to try mencoder for recording from your webcam.
There are some suggestions here[3] under the iSight section for using
mencoder. ffmpeg or gstreamer (thought only the gstreamer suggestion
has a preview). There are also some webcam suggestions here[4].

You could probably just do what you are doing but with mencoder and
pipe it through tee to mplayer. Mplayer might have a better handle on
the video if you *don't* use an avi file (since it won't be indexed)
but it should play it fine nonetheless. You might want to tell
mplayer/vlc *not* to play back audio though (lest you end up with a
feedback loop or just an annoying replay of all the sounds you hear).

[1] http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2002-May/015919.html
[2] http://old.nabble.com/Capture-audio-from-alsa-td15819836.html
[3] http://www.odi.ch/prog/macbookpro/index.php
[4] http://leese.info/projekte/webcam.htm
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