Which free software for video capture?

[Terencek]

I've bought a USB video capture device to use my laptop as a sort of PVR to record from the decoder. But the software which came with it (Ulead VideoStudio) is not great. Can anyone suggest free software which will do the job without too many bells and whistles? Even better would be software which also offers preset timed recordings the way a PVR or video recorder does, but that might be pushing my luck.... Thanks!

[dade]

maybe VLC?

I use one of those usb devices for my security camera and VLC works like a charm for streaming, transcoding and saving to file.

[shogun]

+1 to VLC

Not sure about schedules.

[Goobie]

Windows Media Center or NPVR/GBPVR

[Terencek]

I've used VLC for playback of almost all my multimedia files for years and had no idea you could actually capture video from an external device with it! Thanks for the tip, will give it a try. Prefer not to use Windows Media Center. I am also testing a small freebie called Debut Video Capture. Other suggestions still welcome, many thanks.

[Garyvdh]

You can also try VirtualDub.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

[Zarathustra]

You can use VLC for the capturing & setup scheduling with Windows Scheduler & a batch file, assuming of course that you are using Windows

Check out:

http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentationocumentation

I use this to record Internet radio streams @ specific times of the day, video can be done using the same method.