A friend of mine, wanted to use a standard USB WebCam as an IPCam. He used an old Media-Receiver Box (T-Online S100) and installed Gentoo Linux on an CF Card.
Since Kernel 2.6.27 most of the USB webcams are supported through the Linux UVC drivers, which provides an Video4Linux2 Interface to those cams. We found some programs who claimed being able to grab JPEG images from V4L2 Cams, but most of them either didn't compile, supported only V4L Version 1 or just brought up some other errors.
So I checked up the Video for Linux Two API Specification and found there in Appendix B a small sample of howto communicate with the Cam. I adapted it to our needs and included an converter from YUV colorspace to RGB. Finally I added some code to support the export of JPEG images. Continue reading →