Capturing a thermal IR video with ffmpeg on Linux

When tethered to a computer with USB the Flir E4 [1] thermal camera can act as webcam. The frame rate is limited to 9fps due to ITAR restrictions [2], but this is sufficient for most applications. On Linux FFMPEG [3] can be used to capture a video with this command line:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -r 9 -s 640x480 -i /dev/video0 thermal.avi

You can preview while shooting with the camera's LCD. But sometimes you want to see a preview on screen. That turns out to be tricky.

I found a useful solution on this thread [4]:

1. Create a fifo file:
mkfifo /tmp/livevideo.fifo

2. Run mplayer on the fifo:
mplayer  -cache 512 -really-quiet /tmp/livevideo.fifo

3. Run ffmpeg to capture to file and also relay to the fifo:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -r 9 -s 640x480 -i /dev/video0 thermal.avi -map 0 -f avi -vcodec rawvideo -y /tmp/livevideo.fifo

Here is a sample video captured with ffmpeg:

Footnotes:

[1] also the Flir E6, E8, the Exx range and most (all?) recent models as far as I know

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations

[3] http://www.ffmpeg.org/

[4] http://nerdfever.com/?p=2661