I just needed to record a video stream. Usually, I use mplayer for these kinds of jobs, but this time it failed. However, on the internet I found a way to do it using VLC, which apparently has quite a command line interface.

This comment revealed that the VLC media player comes with some command line magic. Of course, not much is documented in the man page , but the user guide on their website seems to be useful.

Long story short, I ended up with the following command to save the stream http://STREAM.mp4 to /tmp/file.mkv :

vlc http://STREAM.mp4 --sout="#std{access=file,mux=mkv,dst='/tmp/file.mkv'}" vlc://quit 

Cool.

For the records, here are some alternatives:

# using mplayer

mplayer -dumpstream http://STREAM.mp4 -dumpfile /tmp/file.mp4

# using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i http://STREAM.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy /tmp/file.mp4