mpegCam is a a simple software package for shooting video with a
Linux box and a black and white Quickcam. Since
it forks a process to shoot each frame and stores them in separate files
in a directory it is not as fast as possible, however, it shoots 9 frames
per second on my Pentium/133 laptop, so it's useable for low quality movies.
(The only kind you're going to stream over the internet) Capturing to
memory and avoiding the forks, it should be possible to shoot at 15 fps.
MpegCam preserves timecodes with the images which can be
used to synchronize the images with audio or other media. For archival and
distribution, mpegCam compresses video offline to the standard
MPEG-1 format which can be viewed on many platforms.
Since I have many other projects going, I decided to
release mpegCam in it's current primitive state. In the future,
I'm interested in improving performance and recording synchronized audio
and video. I've already found that I can capture 22 khz mono audio while
shooting video -- the primary challenges are timecoding the audio and
figuring out how MPEG System works. Now that Linux 2.2 supports video
capture devices, it would also be desirable to use the standard
interface.
mpegCam-0.01 has a README file.
# mpegCam 0.01 is absolutely free.
# If you hurt yourself or someone else with it, tough luck. We disclaim any
# responsibility.
# http://www.honeylocust.com/mpegcam/
