I have recently purchased an EasyCAP USB video capture device. I would like to know if there is any software out there for Ubuntu for using this device to capture videos from external devices.

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5 Answers

Using VLC I was able to get video to work on Ubuntu 16.04 by opening VLC and then choosing:

• Media -> Open Capture Device... Set Capture Mode to "TV - analog"
• Device name to /dev/video1 Video standard to PAL (but will vary depending on your output device)

I can't get the audio to work with VLC but can record it in Audacity by choosing the "usbtv:" device.

Easycap DC60 has been supported by versions 3 of the Linux kernel for some time. So it should all be a matter of plug'n'pray...,I mean, play.

With the cabling correctly plugged, VLC (available from the Software Centre) can be used to capture sound and image. You must access the menu Media > Open Capture Device and set the EasyCap device (e.g. /dev/video0) for recording (it can also be set for streaming). The Video For Linux 2 library is usually recommended for the job.

There are a few detailed guides out there on this, including videos. I suggested you take a careful look at this guide.

Try the regular mpeg audio codec with any video format whenst recording-converting with VLC. After choosing the right audio input.

Using e.g. h/x264 mp4/mkv video with the usually well-corresponding aac-audio codec means havoc in VLC.

VLC is probably the only relativily decent thing Linux has for recording from e.g. a tv or recorder with scart/AV/composite/s-video to usb (v4l).

But also VLC is far from ideal. Too messed up/complex interface, and it all also depends on the force of the used machine and the used libraries.

The recording button of VLC works well many a time, but the resulting avi-files are really unacceptably large (1 min recording = 1 Gb file size here).

The VLC makers say that recording like this takes the raw stream from the recorded device 'as-is' and that there is nothing to do about it. Not completely true. Take the EasyCap stick e.g., I used it with software from Arcsoft in Windows - I'm sorry - which gave me the choice to record directly to mpeg1 or mpeg2 (also from PAL). The resulting files could be easily cut up and transcoded afterwards. Considering the large transcoding times one would even stick to the original mpeg(2)-format. Anything not to get these ENORMOUS raw avi's which are only viewable with VLC itself.

More hardware-software testing required maybe?

A to more acceptable videoformats configurable recording button with the same pause and continue functionality as with raw streams would be great in VLC. Well functioning recording-audio evenso.

The best way is to use OBS studio to pull in and capture the combined video and audio streams using it's local record.

This is a solution to capturing the audio (along with the video) from a camcorder using EasyCAP and VLC. All posts I found use three different software to capture video and audio:

• VLC to capture video
• Other audio tool, like Audacity, to capture audio
• Then a third software to merge the video and audio

This solution consists of using just VLC to capture both audio and video. Here are the steps under Ubuntu 16.04 and VLC 2.2.7

1. On VLC go to Media -> Open Capture Device...
2. Set Capture Mode to "TV - analog"
3. Set Device name to /dev/video1
4. Set Audio device name to alsa://hw:2,0 (see the output of audio commands in my case, below)
5. Set Video standard to PAL (but will vary depending on your output device)
6. Click on Convert (In the drop down next to Play button)
7. Select file name
8. Enjoy

The outputs from audio commands on my box:

$ arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 1: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC269VC Analog [ALC269VC Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: STK1160 [STK1160], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 

$ cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [Generic ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic HD-Audio Generic at 0xf0344000 irq 35 1 [Generic_1 ]: HDA-Intel - HD-Audio Generic HD-Audio Generic at 0xf0340000 irq 36 2 [STK1160 ]: USB-Audio - STK1160 Syntek STK1160 at usb-0000:00:12.2-2, high speed

$ amixer -c 2
Simple mixer control 'Mic',0 Capabilities: cswitch cswitch-joined Capture channels: Mono Mono: Capture [on]

$ amixer -c STK1160
Simple mixer control 'Mic',0 Capabilities: cswitch cswitch-joined Capture channels: Mono Mono: Capture [on]

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