Configuring A/V Equipment in Linux for Recording

Microphones

You can check the sound card configuration with “cat /proc/asound/cards” and the pcm configuration with “cat /proc/asound/pcm”. These produce the following output:

[jay@computer ~]$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [Intel          ]: HDA-Intel – HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xe3100000 irq 29
1 [U0x46d0x809    ]: USB-Audio – USB Device 0x46d:0x809
USB Device 0x46d:0x809 at usb-0000:00:1d.7-5.1, high speed

[jay@computer ~]$ cat /proc/asound/pcm
00-00: ALC262 Analog : ALC262 Analog : playback 1 : capture 1
00-02: ALC262 Analog : ALC262 Analog : capture 2
01-00: USB Audio : USB Audio : capture 1

The Audacity team has published some good resources on configuring USB microphones here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/USB_mic_on_Linux#Setting_default_recording_device.
Webcameras

Webcams are located at /dev/video* where * is a integer starting at zero. If you have one webcamera it is located at /dev/video0 and a second would be located at /dev/video1.

“ucview” is a good program for recording videos with your webcamera.

Stripping Audio from Video with FFMPEG

A command like the following will strip the audio from an ogg file and write it to another ogg file:

ffmpeg -i video.ogg -vn -acodec copy video_audioOnly.ogg