Grabbing webcam to video on the web

[Olivier]

Hi,

I am trying to write an application that will grab a video from a
(cheap) USB camera (/dev/video0) and transform it into a format that can
be embded on a web page.

- memcoder used to work and produce an .avi file, but they are not
recognized anymore by modern web browsers; and mencoder is a beast;

- ffmpeg is producing a valid .mp4 file, but it is slow to start;

  sudo nice -20 /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -r 5 -f v4l2 -video_size
  640x480 -i /dev/video0 -r 5 test.mp4
  
Is there in the ports something else I could use? Or a way to make
ffmpeg start faster? Ny problem is that the video are always very short,
a couple of seconds each, just enough for someone to pass throufg a
door.

One ideal solution would be something that runs all the time in th
background and that would receive signals telling the application it
should start to recording instead of dropping the packets.

Thanks in advance,

Olivier



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