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What’s up people, these last days (and weeks) I’ve been working with Red5, and learning along the way because I had never used it beyond ‘Hello world’ type experiments, and it’s a shame I did not started to play with it earlier, because is so damn cool. Thanks a lot Red5 Team!

Anyway, I’ve seen some folks here and there asking on how to record a live webcam/mic stream using Red5, and some long ago when I searched for that I did not find a straightforward answer (AKA gimme the code :D), so for those fellas that are badass lazy as I am, and that their hopes are to find all the help (AKA gimme the code) on Google, here’s a little example that should get your ass going (if you were too lazy to try this suggestion which you should do if you want to really learn )

Ok, I’ll assume you have everything in order so we can go ahead and get our cameras and microphones:

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var myCam:Camera = Camera.getCamera();
var myMic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();
myMic.setLoopback(true);

, then create our net stream and attach the live video/audio to it. Here you could add some validations to verify that you are getting your camera and mic feed as expected (e.g. not null), I will omit it however because my fingers are getting tired.

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// Create our net stream, by the way for the sake of brevity let's assume you have all your connection sh!t together
var stream:NetStream = new NetStream(myNetConnection);
// add a listener so we know when our stuff is ready for recording
stream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, onRecStreamStatus);
stream.attachCamera(myCam );
stream.attachAudio(myMic);
stream.publish('myStream', 'live');

Now the stream status event handler, as you’ll see, when your stream has started to “stream” ha! then you are ready to record,

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private function onRecStreamStatus(e:NetStatusEvent):void
{
        if ( e.info.code == "NetStream.Publish.Start" )
        {
             myConnection.call('startRecordingStream', null);
        }
}

This line myConnection.call('startRecordingStream', null); invokes the method ’startRecordingStream’ on our Red5 service which is responsible for handling our streams and recording/saving them accordingly… and it could look something like this…is Java by the way

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//Java
 
public void startRecordingStream(IConnection conn)
{
	String clientId = conn.getClient().getId();
	IScope scope = conn.getScope();
 
	String streamName = clientId + "_" + String.valueOf(System.currentTimeMillis());
 
	try
	{
		ClientBroadcastStream stream = (ClientBroadcastStream) this.getBroadcastStream(conn.getScope(), "myStream" );
		stream.saveAs(streamName, false);
		// You could, if you wish of course, notify the user that the recording has actually started
		// You just have to add the recordingStarted public function on your flash application
		ServiceUtils.invokeOnConnection(conn, "recordingStarted", new Object[]{clientId});
	}
	catch(Exception e)
	{
		// You could notify the user that the recording failed for some stupid reason
		// sometimes things does not go well :)
		// You just have to add the recordingStarted public function on your flash application
		ServiceUtils.invokeOnConnection(conn, "recordingFailed", new Object[]{clientId});
	}
}

And if you want to have a button to stop recording on your flash app., just throw a button and when is clicked invokes a method on your Red5 service for stopping the recording process. Something like this:

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//AS3
//assuming this is on a click handler or whatever
myConnection.call('stopRecordingStream', null);

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//Java
public void stopRecordingStream(IConnection conn)
{
	String clientId = conn.getClient().getId();
	ClientBroadcastStream stream = (ClientBroadcastStream) this.getBroadcastStream(conn.getScope(), "myStream");
	stream.stopRecording();
	ServiceUtils.invokeOnConnection(conn, "recordingStopped", new Object[]{clientId});
}

As Dominick pointed out on his blog post, you should get your recorded stream under red5/webapps/YouBadAssApplication/streams.

There are lot of things that have to be done in order to have video/voice application running smoothly, however I hope this helps you in realizing how simple Red5 makes things for us. Let me know if I missed something, if there are other workarounds you have found, or whatever you might wanna say

Cheers!