[MPlayer-users] mplayer as a frame grabber for a webcam? (I know, I know, but listen for a minute . . )

[Eric Jorgensen]

	I recently got fed up with the miniature system i'd been using to drive my
webcam with win95 and an old parallel port capture dongle, decided to use a
bt878 card in a linux box and a long video cable instead. 

	Of course, that parallel port capture device had deinterlacing in hardware (or
at least software on a microcontroller in the box), so i can nolonger use a full
640x480 frame. 

	I'd like to use a bigger frame, because it's my fishtank webcam. You can see it
for yourself at http://we.areb.org/fishcam 

	If i capture a 640x480 frame from the bttv device, I get a badly interlaced
frame. so I'm stuck with 320x240 until i figure out how to deinterlace a jpg
captured from the bt878. 

	It struck me that mplayer has tv card support, and jpeg output support, and of
course deinterlacing support. But, when i try: 

mplayer -tv on:driver=v4l:input=1:norm=ntsc -vo jpeg -jpeg \
quality=75:optimize:progressive:outdir=/tmp -vop pp=lb -frames 1

	Nothing happens. mplayer parses the config files and exits. As near as i can
tell no jpeg files are created anywhere. But i don't get an error either. 

mplayer -tv on:driver=v4l:input=1:norm=ntsc -vop pp=lb -vo aa -frames 1 

	displays one ascii frame and exits. So I think I'm on the right track, but
something is missing. 

	It would also be neat if i could use mplayer to save say three or four small
frames at 2fps to an animated gif. Fish are more fun when you can watch them
swim, after all. 

	Anybody got any ideas? Functionality just isn't there, perhaps?

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