Free capturing software for linux

DMAring project is a novel generic network interface card driver architecture which works in hybrid interrupt-polling mode to deliver superior real-time performance on Linux, Redhat Linux or Linux-RTAI-LXRT (a real-time co-kernel for Linux with user level extension).

Existing Linux drivers are inefficient, they saturate the CPU at a much lower packet rates than the maximum wire line packet rate that is possible. But with this driver, vanilla network cards can be used for high speed packet capturing. This driver improves the packet capturing speed by 7 to 10 times, and the real-time packet delivery response by 500 to 5000 times over existing drivers and alternate approaches (HIP, NAPI, pfring, check the references in the papers for performance comparisons [1, 2, 3]), depending on whether Redhat Linux or RTAI is used. Thus this obviates the need for expensive high capacity hardware, specialized network data acquisition cards and systems (for example from Endace).

This project contain basic source codes, which other developers can use/adapt for their applications, and three published conference papers [1, 2, 3] describes the architecture and establishes its benefits. One of the papers (at SANE 2006) also documents the detailed architecture and provides guidelines to modify any Linux network interface driver (Donald Becker style drivers).

Earlier I had received lot of mail request from networking, network security/monitoring domain people, to get these codes or modified specific network drivers. I am looking forward that some developer will take up this project, churn out driver modifications for the most common net work cards and share with others. I will continue to add other drivers, and libpcap library modifications when I get more time.

Anybody willing to know the issues involved in real-time Linux or looking for real-time networking solutions can take a look at my Masters thesis. I found RTAI with LXRT to be a very tractable, good performance, cheap (free!) real-time Linux option. My thesis contains some useful performance related discussions on this.

libpcap is a handy little library which provides a packet filtering mechanism based on the BSD packet filter (BPF).
Enhancements:
- Basic BPF filtering, Bluetooth, USB capturing on Linux, FreeBSD BIOCSDIRECTION ioctl, additional filter operations for 802.11 frame types, and support for filtering on MTP2 frame types were all added, and numerous other minor enhancements and bugfixes were made.

Radiocap is a GUI frontend to sox, oggenc, and lame for recording audio with a soundcard (WAV, Ogg, and MP3). It has a built in timer for scheduled capturing of radio programs. Recording levels are always displayed (even when recording has not started), which helps when adjusting the input gain.

Installation instructions:

1. make a directory for the source-files...
cd /tmp
mkdir build
cd build

2. unpack the source...
tar -xzvf radiocapXXX.tar.gz

3. build the application...
cd radiocap
make

4. become superuser and install..
su
make install

MailRecon is Unix email content control application. It does listen network traffic, capture SMTP messages, analyse it (checks against very flexible and extendable checklist), discards usual private/business messages and save suspicious messages for detailed inspection by security staff.
Main features:
- Capturing email messages from the wire. So its compatible will all mailing software, do not require any reconfiguration and captures messages even if its sent directly to recipient bypassing your mailserver.
- Support for SMTP and POP3 protocols.
- Very flexible mailing filter which goes with MailRecon allows to record only suspicious messages which worth to be examined, and skip usual private and business messages.
- Open Architecture. MailRecon supports plugins for analysis and save of messages. Its very easy to extend its functionality with new plugins - every programmer and system administrator can write it.
- Thanks to Open Architecture, you can use your favorite mail reader or browser to manage archive of captured suspicious messages.
- For limited time, WWW-Security offers free installation and support of evaluation versions on your servers.
- FREE evaluation version which is never expires!
Installation:
- Create user mailrecon and groups mailrecon and mail
- From installation directory run "make install" (as root)
- Copy init.d/mailrecon to your init.d directory and optionally create symlinks from rcN directories if you want to automatially start mailrecon on boot.

Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting beween different container formats. Transcode can decode and encode many audio and video formats, e.g.
- MPEG-1/2
- MPEG-4(-part 3) (also DivX and XviD variants)
- Quicktime / MPEG-PS (dvd) (decode only)
- MPEG-1-layer-1/2/3 audio
- AC3 audio
Transcode has a variety of video and audio pre and post-processing filters, including (but not limited to):
- video de-interlacing
- audio resampling
- framerate conversion
- smoothing
- cutting
Transcode can import DVDs on-the-fly, or record from Video4Linux (including V4L2 video capturing) devices.
A number of modules are included to enable import of DVDs on-the-fly, Video4Linux (including V4L2 video capturing), MPEG elementary streams (ES) or program streams (VOB), MPEG1/2/4 video, Digital Video (DV), YUV4MPEG streams, Nuppel Video (NUV), quicktime (MOV), MPEG audio layer-1/2/3, WAVE, DIVX, MJPEG, and raw or compressed (pass-through) video frames.
A number of export modules for enable writing DivX ;-), DivX 4.02/5.xx, XviD, Digital Video, MPEG-1/2 or uncompressed AVI files with MPEG, AC3 (pass-through) or PCM audio. More file formats and codecs for audio/video import are supported by the MPlayer and avifile import modules (exporting with avifile is restricted to video codecs, with MPEG/PCM or AC3 (pass-through) audio provided by transcode). Limited DVD subtitle rendering is also available.
Its modular concept is intended to provide flexibility and easy user extensibility to include other video/audio codecs or file types. A set of tools is available to extract, demultiplex and decode the sources into raw video/audio streams for import, non AVI-file export modules for writing single frames (PPM) or YUV4MPEG streams, auto-probing and scanning your sources and to enable post-processing of AVI files, including header fixing, merging multiple files or splitting large AVI files to fit on a CD.
Transcode runs on UN*X like systems like Linux, BSD, and MacOSX.
Transcode loads shared library modules that are responsible for feeding it with raw streams and encoding the frames:
The Import Modules for audio/video decoding are loaded with dlopen system call and are responsible for starting the video and audio streams (directly or via the popen system call) and have a single function interface to the main program. The import is handled by a thread that buffers the video/audio frames.
The main program transcode currently performs a number of simple video/audio frame manipulations (in this order) or allows simple pass-through of raw frame data:
Video:
- cut out arbitray frame region for processing
- de-interlace video frame
- fast enlarging of video width/height by a multiple of 32 rows/column up to 1024x768
- fast reduction of video width/height by a multiple of 32 rows/column
- high-quality resizing with filter
- cut out arbitray frame region for encoding
- rescale (downsample) video width/height by a power of 2
- flip video frame upside down
- mirror image of video frame
- swap R and B bytes in video frame
- transform to b/w video frame
- apply gamma correction
- anti-alias video frame
Audio:
- change the volume of the audio stream
- resample audio stream
- swap byte order in audio stream
- sync video with audio frames (V=0|A=N, V=1|A=N+1,...)
- Filter Plugins:
- Additional effects are available via external filter plugins loaded with option "-J".
The Export Modules for audio/video encoding are loaded via the dlopen system call and the encoder loop is started for the selected frames. In most cases audio and video are handled by the same module.
Enhancements:
- This release includes only critical hotfixes.
- The main highlight is compatibilty with newer releases of ffmpeg libraries.
- Some filters have been updated.

ScreenKast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.
ScreenKast also acts as a client for the captorials.com website that enables you to share your captured tutorial with users around the world.
Installation:
Unpack the screenkast source tarball and go into the uncompressed directory.
$ tar xvzf screenkast-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd screenkast-0.1
Build the necessary autotools-files and configure.
$ make -f Makefile.cvs
$ export CXXFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/libinstrudeo"
NOTE: make sure you copied the libinstrudeo-source files to this directory.
See the INSTALL-file of libinstrudeo for more details on this.
$ ./configure
Compile the library.
$ make
Install the library.
$ make install
Enhancements:
- Fixed focus-order in all dialogs.
- Commentbox end now feature.
- Video properties display.
- Adjustable default commentbox settings.
- Fixed the file-open on error bug
- Improved open/close-state handling.

PVRec is a simple applet written in Gambas that takes an MPEG-2 stream from the pvrusb driver for the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB and allows you to simultaneously view (using Mplayer) and record it.

PVRec is basically the smallest amount of code I could write to let myself easily record video using the PVR USB without doing so blindly. In the future I hope to include more PVR-esque features like scheduled recording, basic format conversions (i.e. Divx/Xvid
instead of MPEG-2) and maybe better mplayer automation, but this should at least let you get the job done as far as getting video into your computer. In essence, PVRec is nothing but a GUI with three pipes.

If you have any problems capturing video with it, e.g. a blank mplayer window or mplayer never comes up at all or the bytes received counter never increases, try the following:

cat /dev/usb/lp0 >myvideo.mpg

and see if that lets you get any video either. If it doesnt, then its a problem with the driver or your PVR USB, and not this program. If it does, well, theres a reason I made this version 0.1.

PVRec requires Gambas, which I have packaged for Mandrake Linux and which is available at http://gambas.sf.net. The pvrusb driver is available at http://pvrusb.sf.net. If you plan on viewing the video while you record it, youll need mplayer as well; if you dont have a prebuilt version of mplayer for your Linux distribution, I have to pity you and hope mplayer is easier to build than it used to be.