Recording video with Opencv Python Multithreading

I think you're on the right track but I was unable to save a file with your code. Here's a video-stream-to-video widget using multithreading to obtain the frames. There are two threads for each camera stream:

• Thread #1 - Dedicated to only reading frames from the camera stream.
• Thread #2 - Dedicated for processing frames (showing and writing).

We separate reading frames from showing/writing because cv2.VideoCapture.read() is a blocking operation. Thus we read frames in its own independent thread to 'improve' FPS by reducing latency due to I/O operations. In addition, by isolating frame capture to its own thread, there will always be a frame ready to be processed instead of having to wait for the I/O operation to complete and return a new frame. In our second thread dedicated to processing, we are now freely able to show and save each frame to our output file.

Also by encapsulating all this into a single object, we can create a set of threads for each camera which scales easily no matter how many cameras are being used. Since each camera stream is spawned in a background thread, we must keep the main thread alive. Be sure to change the src string to your own camera. Here's an example of recording three video streams simultaneously.

from threading import Thread
import cv2
import time

class VideoWriterWidget(object):
    def __init__(self, video_file_name, src=0):
        # Create a VideoCapture object
        self.frame_name = str(src)
        self.video_file = video_file_name
        self.video_file_name = video_file_name + '.avi'
        self.capture = cv2.VideoCapture(src)

        # Default resolutions of the frame are obtained (system dependent)
        self.frame_width = int(self.capture.get(3))
        self.frame_height = int(self.capture.get(4))

        # Set up codec and output video settings
        self.codec = cv2.VideoWriter_fourcc('M','J','P','G')
        self.output_video = cv2.VideoWriter(self.video_file_name, self.codec, 30, (self.frame_width, self.frame_height))

        # Start the thread to read frames from the video stream
        self.thread = Thread(target=self.update, args=())
        self.thread.daemon = True
        self.thread.start()

        # Start another thread to show/save frames
        self.start_recording()
        print('initialized {}'.format(self.video_file))

    def update(self):
        # Read the next frame from the stream in a different thread
        while True:
            if self.capture.isOpened():
                (self.status, self.frame) = self.capture.read()

    def show_frame(self):
        # Display frames in main program
        if self.status:
            cv2.imshow(self.frame_name, self.frame)

        # Press Q on keyboard to stop recording
        key = cv2.waitKey(1)
        if key == ord('q'):
            self.capture.release()
            self.output_video.release()
            cv2.destroyAllWindows()
            exit(1)

    def save_frame(self):
        # Save obtained frame into video output file
        self.output_video.write(self.frame)

    def start_recording(self):
        # Create another thread to show/save frames
        def start_recording_thread():
            while True:
                try:
                    self.show_frame()
                    self.save_frame()
                except AttributeError:
                    pass
        self.recording_thread = Thread(target=start_recording_thread, args=())
        self.recording_thread.daemon = True
        self.recording_thread.start()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    src1 = 'Your link1'
    video_writer_widget1 = VideoWriterWidget('Camera 1', src1)
    src2 = 'Your link2'
    video_writer_widget2 = VideoWriterWidget('Camera 2', src2)
    src3 = 'Your link3'
    video_writer_widget3 = VideoWriterWidget('Camera 3', src3)

    # Since each video player is in its own thread, we need to keep the main thread alive.
    # Keep spinning using time.sleep() so the background threads keep running
    # Threads are set to daemon=True so they will automatically die 
    # when the main thread dies
    while True:
        time.sleep(5)