[FFmpeg-user] periodic volume detection on AV capturing

[Albert Scholtalbers]

I have the following challenge. I have a server capturing with VLC, I
didn't know FFmpeg that well, which captures analogue video/video and
encodes it in h264/aac as a mpeg-ts and stores it as a file and creates a
stream of this content at the same time.
This stream is used/read by another VLC process to create periodically
small snapshots of the stream/recording. This enables remote monitoring of
the recorded content on low bandwidth Internet connections as I can forward
these snapshots to a web server.

What I like to achieve is do something similar for audio detection, so I
can see that the audo is still present and not too loud/soft. Viewcast is
lacking a cli-based audio detection and I saw that FFmpeg has a filter
named: volumedetect for that. But what is the most wise solution to do this.
1) Start FFmpeg on a periodical base like: every 15 minutes an read the
stream for 15 seconds (with -t option) and parse the output to a server. Is
this possible with streams or only files?
2) Cut a piece from the recorded file (I log the filesize every minute with
a timestamp) on a periodical base and let this FFmpeg do volume detection
on this file and parse the output to a server.

Or are there other ways to achieve this in a "nicer" way. I'm using Windows
7.

Thanks in advance

Albert