Cheese Alternative?

[Hooya]

VLC will do it. Media->Convert/Save, Capture Device tab, change settings as you like (Video device name can be blank) and hit Convert/Save. Choose a filename and a YouTube-supported format for Profile and click Start.

I've tried doing this and nothing happens. No errors in any log, no output, nothing. If I choose the "file" option instead of "capture device" some of the files will output to a 10Kb junk file, but none of the conversions I do will work. VLC will play these media files fairly well (seeking is broken).

What a crappy program Cheese is to output corrupt files and not offer any other file type options or codecs.... Now my whole morning doing filming with it is out the window because I have these worthless files sitting on my drive. There's got to be a way to convert these things.

[Bucky Ball]

Huh?? If it outputs files in unusable formats how is it the best??

Unusable when attempting to upload to Youtube I think is the point. They are usable files elsewhere.

[Hooya]

Unusable when attempting to upload to Youtube I think is the point. They are usable files elsewhere.

Only VLC reliably can play the files back. Some of the files won't even play in any of the other media players I have.

[no2498]

cheese and vlc make the same ogg files for me
wxcam makes avi file type
but its only for 32 bit not 64 they need to work to get it installed

[MestreLion]

See, I use youtube regularly, but I can't record videos on my laptop.Everyone I've asked says that cheese is by far the best software available for linux users, but it saves in an unusable format.

Actually, YouTube accepts Ogg Theora just fine. I just uploaded some videos recorded using gtkRecordMyDesktop, which uses exactly the same encoder as Cheese.

ogv, or ogg, or something in a "theora" codec.

- Ogg is the name of the media container (like AVI or Matroska)
- .ogv is its filename extension (like .avi or .mkv)
- Theora is the name of the video format (the "codec", like MPEG-2 or H.264)

And Ogg/Theora were, until very recently, the the only (or at least most popular) patent-free, open source, open standard for media container and video encoder, thus being the standard in nearly all free video software.

Is there an alternative webcam application that will record video in a usable format?

You friends were right: Cheese is the best, in terms of ease of use and integration with the OS. It record videos, take single pictures, burst pictures, apply cheesy effects, etc, all in a simple app. It's not Cheese's fault if the the facto standard video format available in Ubuntu is Ogg/Theora.

But you can play it in Totem, Gnome MPlayer, VLC, and it works fine in YouTube. Looks like pretty usable for me

In the future, probably WebM will replace Theora as the default video format.