Ubuntu bad for webcam recording/screencasting or is it just me?

Question

I have a few webcams sitting around and I tried recording video using GUVCview, VLC, Cheese, and a few others and they all have a terrible background noise, and/or the audio is out of sync...how can I fix this issue, is this a bug in pulseaudio?

Screencasting works sometimes, but it usually crashes after about 5 minutes of recording....which is a serious problem!

The webcam is a Logitech C270.

Computer setup

Nvidia Geforce 550ti GPU AMD FX 4100 (3.6ghz Quadcore) CPU Asus M5a97 Motherboard. Ubuntu 12.04/12.10

Answer 1

I usually use ffmpeg from the command line to either do screencasting or even to record video from my embeded webcam. It can be ressource greedy depending on what type of video you want to create but it's always of very good quality! For example to record your desktop you can use: ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wuxga -r 14 -i :0.0 -b 800k -an -vcodec mpeg4 screencast.avi

There is also a v4l2 format to capture video from webcam ffmpeg -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 -an -b 800k -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec mpeg4 screencast.avi

To be honnest I almost never capture sound but it's worth give ffmpeg a try.

Note that some distro deprecated ffmpeg in favour of avconv (libavtools).