I’ve used cheese and other webcam programs and I have yet to find a pause while recording. Does anyone know of a webcam program that has a pause feature while recording?
While none of the webcam programs seem to have a pause feature when recording, VLC fits the bill nicely…Or am I missing something?
Typically if I want a pause, I simply stop/start a new video (with an application such as guvcview). The video/audio codec/format is the same for each portion, and joining the separate videos recorded by the program is often as simply as using a ‘cat’ command.
I don’t know how to join separate videos. I have a lot to learn in this area. I want to make videos where I can do powerpoint presentations and have it focus on me and switch between. Sometimes I need pause so that I can research something or whatever.
Cat is very basic wrt videos. It works just ‘ok’ (no more) if joining videos with exactly the same frame rate, same codecs, with no editing desired:
cat video1 video2 video3 > joinedvideofile
There was a time when one could do the same with mencoder. But mencoder may be depreciated (not sure) so I don’t know if this still works:
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o joinedvideofile.avi video1 video2 video3
where video1 and video2 and video3 in the above example are the webcam recorded videos and joinedvideofile is the same three videos joined together.
Now adays, I tend to be a bit fussier with my videos, and given the power of new computers, I find it almost just as easy to use an app such as kdenlive. I launch kdenlive, then with “dolphin file manager” drag all the videos into the “project tree” in kdenlive, then if I do not want to edit anything, I directly drag the videos 1 by 1 from the “project tree” down to the ‘kdenlive’ timeline, and then with all videos sequentially in the timeline I click on the ‘render’ button, select the output format/codec I want and click “render to file”. Of course using ‘kdenlive’ is slower than using ‘cat’ or using ‘mencoder’, but kdenlive’ does allow me to edit out bits that I do not want, without having to redo or throwout the entire video clip.
Thanks oldcpu. If my daughter were still around, I would have asked her. I never would have imagined that I’d be doing videos, doing teachings and such. So I never got around to learning this stuff. You, oldcpu, make it sound crazy simple.
I recently had to combine a number of files of .m4v format, which had forced embedded subtitles (that I did want to lose). I managed to do this using the rpm package gpac with the application MP4Box.
I needed to do this, as just using ‘cat’ in this case did not work for me.
To combine the files, I added -cat filename.m4v for each of my files to this command, with -new outputvideo.m4v as my output, combined file:
The command was:
MP4Box -cat video1.m4v -cat video2.m4v -cat video3.m4v -new outputvideo.m4v