Since the Latitude 1720’s webcam is only supported by a handful of applications (see the Linux UVC homepage) and none of them are for recording vidoes with sound, I decided to come up with a quick workaround. I wrote a tiny shell script called record.sh which just runs two commands at the same time, ffmpeg and sound-record so that they are synced up. It goes like this:

!#/bin/sh ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320x240 -i /dev/video0 -f avi out.avi & sound-recorder -c 2 -b 16 -P recording.wav

This should outpit out.avi and recording.wav in the current directory, and then you can put the two together using your viedo editor of choice. I use Pitivi and walla, you have a video ready for youtube or whatnot. Now my laptop is, I think, fully functional.