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