The VideoLAN Forums

Dears

Could someone please let me know if this is possible to run VLC in a background (no GUI displayed on screen) via command line (cmd / bat) with additional parameters (options?) indicating destination (storage location), file extension and codec ?

And which codec is the best for screen recording / smallest output (mouse move, applications on screen)?

Thank you very much for your support.

Best regards
Mariusz

The keyword for search in google or similar is "screen capture" which gives for example this page:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2208 ... g-terminal
(example for MacOS).
Under Linux you can directly use this command (very similar to the example in the link): assuming to save in the file "capture.mp4" in the local folder (where you are while starting vlc from the command line).
Here the option: "-I dummy" indicates "no GUI" and the other options are for the screen capture where "screen://" is the main device, "--screen-fps=25" gives the framerate (can be modified, reduced to economize place). The container/encapsulation is mp4 and the codec is h264 (same as normal HD TV codec from DVB etc.) which seems the most efficient (in a test I got a bitrate of ~650 Kb/s for 1920x1080 resolution which is not much at all for a HD video but the screen movement was also very modest). When you have fast movements this may be much higher and probably also eat a lot of CPU power.

In Linux to put this in "background" you simply add an "&" behind the command line. I am not sure how to do this exactly in Windows but the main command line should be similar, maybe you need full pathes for vlc and the destination file (maybe with "..." around to protect for strange symbols etc.). Apart from such details it should also work in Windows.

The remaining problem is how to "stop" it when you are finished (actually the question asked in the above link of stackoverflow.com). In vlc you can also add some option "--run-time=XXX" for a run time of XXX seconds (with XXX being some number).

Hello kmf31.

Thank you for your hints,

I used this syntax:
Something is happen (probably works):



But then I can't find output file:



Whene could I find this file ?