Open Warrior

I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out how I could use MEncoder to record video and audio from my webcam and kept running into a “floating point exception” problem. In scouring the internet I realised that many people seem to be having the exact same problem. It turns out that the problem is due to a bug in MEncoder and is simply fixed by installing the latest version.

I use Kubuntu Jaunty so the problem for me lay in the version of Mencoder that comes packaged with it. To fix the problem all I did was follow these instruction for adding a thrid party repository for newer builds of MPlayer/MEncoder and then installed the latest MEncoder using apt-get.

sudo apt-get install mplayer mencoder

Thereafter I was able to capture video and audio from my webcam using the following command:

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=320:height=240:device=/dev/video0:forceaudio:adevice=/dev/dsp -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 -o webcam.avi

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