[MPlayer-users] how do I make mplayer dump uncompressed rgb data?

[Amadeus W.M.]

I'm writing an application for processing medical images. 
Besides displaying the clips (quicktime), I have to do some 
processing on each individual frame. 

Is there any way to use mplayer to decode the clips, then somehow 
"steal" the RGB24 (ppm) images?

I'm thinking something like

mkfifo video
mplayer file.mov -dumpvideo -dumpfile video

then have my application read from video. But this will dump the
undecoded video stream, is this correct? Is there any way to 
make mplayer output the uncompressed rgb images to the named pipe?

I'm not opposed to doing this with transcode, if there's a way.

Thanks!