How can I record a TikTok Live stream on Linux?

Question

I tried using the Chrome extension Flonnect, but while it worked for a small test capture of a few seconds, the extension crashed when I tried to capture a few hours in full-screen mode.

I want to capture in full-screen mode because I'm not interested in capturing anything other than the video stream itself.

I then tried Screen Recorder for Google Chrome, but while this does seem to work, the saved video file is screwed up in some way - mpv isn't able to determine how long it is, so it keeps thinking that it's nearly at the end of the video. Even the extension itself has this problem when it's playing back the videos!

Answer 1

I think the issue may be that it is very computationally intensive to do live transcoding for video. Most screen recorders are assuming you're recording desktop graphics that are not as fast moving as 30fps video. Unless you have a very fast graphics card, your screen recorder probably can't keep up.

If you have a lot of disk space (i.e., 1TB+) you could do the following:

1. Install something like Record My Desktop (https://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/about.php)
2. Run the recorder in on-the-fly mode: recordmydesktop --on-the-fly-encoding

This will record the raw video data and not attempt to encode it. If your video is hours long, this could store data into the terabytes, so you'll need a lot of disk space.

3. After the recording is complete use something like ffmpeg to convert the raw video to a compressed version (e.g., mp4):

ffmpeg -i input.mov -preset slow -codec:a libfdk_aac \
    -b:a 128k -codec:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p \
    -b:v 4500k -minrate 4500k -maxrate 9000k \
    -bufsize 9000k -vf scale=-1:1080 output.mp4

Since this is transcoding the video, you will necessarily lose some quality from the original stream. However, it most likely won't be very noticeable.

Answer 2

if you want I made a tool to record live tiktok. Try it out! https://github.com/Michele0303/TikTok-Live-Recorder