Saving V4L2 video camera output

Question

What video format would be the easiest when saving the output of a camera using V4L2 if I capture it in bitmap format? Getting mpeg directly could be, of course, nice, but I can't unfortunately count on that.

I have managed to capture the frames, now I need to somehow view the video. Can I simply convert those frames using some Linux tool or could I save the video easily straight from my app?

Answer 1

To keep things simple (as in a Proof-of-Concept demo), you can go ahead and directly store the YUV frames captured from the device into a file.

There are a bunch of viewers that support playback of single/multiple frame(s) of YUV data from a file.

One such YUV viewer is freecode.com/projects/yay

Answer 2

You could use practically any format/codec if you used mencoder or ffmpeg

Btw, this question really should be on superuser.com

Answer 3

If you are capturing frames already, you could save them to PPM images and then go to JPEG. I did this using v4l2 and ImageMagick. Maybe you could push JPEGs into a Motion JPEG stream. It might not be as high tech as MPEG, but you might get it working quickly. PPM files were a cinch to create. If I remember correctly, the v4l2 example code shows you how to do that part.