I found a Mac OS X hint yesterday mentioning how VideoLAN CLient (VLC) can save streaming videos into a file. Since today I wanted to record a radio show off the Internet, I gave it a shot for an audio stream too.

Here’s what I got:

If you want to save a Quicktime (AAC/MP4) audio stream (maybe others, too? Leave a comment if you know!) to a file, start VLC from the command line (terminal window) like this:


/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC –rtsp-tcp \
rtsp://example.com/path/to/stream \
–sout ‘#standard{access=file,mux=mp4,url=/Users/\
Shared/VLCoutput.mp4}’


(obviously, you needn’t break it up into several lines of code, you can just leave out the line breaks as well as the backslashes: We will use that format in a jiffy).

Now, if you want to schedule the whole thing, a cron job will do the job. The tool at would be certainly more correct (since you don’t want to schedule it as a recurrent task), but the at daemon is disabled on OS X by default.

So, do a crontab -e and put in two lines like this (yes, put the whole VLC stuff into one line as mentioned above):

0 15 12 5 * /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --rtsp-tcp rtsp://example.com/path/to/stream --sout '#standard{access=file,mux=mp4,url=/Users/Shared/VLCoutput.mp4}'
30 15 12 5 * killall -QUIT VLC

The first line starts VLC as mentioned above. 0 15 12 5 means: Start at 3 p.m. (= 0 15), on May 12 (= 12 5). The asterisks in each of the lines just mean that you don’t care about the weekday.
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That kind of impressed me today when I saw this Washington Post article on digg.com:

A Washington Post poll shows that the majority (63%) of Americans are ok with the cyber and wiretapping efforts of the NSA. Almost the same percentage, even a little more, are ok if their personal calls were collected by the NSA. Americans are apparently willing to sacrifice privacy for security.

That disturbs me a little bit. Are these people concerned about privacy so little? Are basic civil rights not an issue, as long as gas is cheap? It seems to be a socially inherent problem in the U.S.: Society (in the majority of cases) here seems to be highly judgemental, insisting on personal freedom far more than I have ever seen before but at the same time not leaving their hands off issues that are just not their business, i.e. somebody else’s private concerns.
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