bag a kinect for more than 30 seconds

edit

I ran into similar issues when trying to record Kinect data. I'm not sure what's causing it - I assumed that the data was just too much. 10 seconds of data ended up in the gigabyte range if I recall correctly.

I ended up switching to the openni_camera_unstable driver, which is nodelet based. You can record the data at the image level, before it gets expanded to a 3D PointCloud beast.

The launch files (when I last looked) were a little confusing. I created a working set of record / playback launch files for that driver, which I can share if there's interest.

EDIT:

Here are some launch files for the unstable driver. They are mostly based on the existing launch files, but I've broken them up to allow modular recording:

http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/data/kinect/launch_modular/

You need to place the launch_modular folder in the openni_camera_unstable package.

There are 3 top-level files you can use directly:

• openni_live.launch: launches the driver, publishing live data
• openni_record.launch: launches the driver, publishing live data, and recording part of the data
• openni_play.launch: launches rosbag, processes the data and publishes it.

openni_record assumes you have ~/ros/bags directory already created. Bags are placed there. To play the correct bag, you need to edit the include/openni_play_bag.launch file:

<arg name="BAG_NAME" value="kinect.bag"/>

with the name of the bag you want, assuming it's in the ~ros/bags directory.