Reading output of a USB webcam in Linux

Question

I was experimenting with a little bit with fread and fwrite in C. So i wrote this little program in C to get data from a webcam and dump it into a file. The following is the sou

Answer 1

The Sony EyeToy has an OV7648 sensor with the quite popular OV519 bridge. The OV519 outputs frames in JPEG format - and if I remember correctly from my own cameras that's the only format that it supports.

Cameras like this require either application support, or a special driver that will decompress the frames before delivery to userspace. Apparently in your case the driver delivers the JPEG frames in their original form, which is why you are getting JPEG data in the output.

BTW, you should really have a look at the Video4Linux2 API for the proper way to access video devices on Linux - a simple open()/read()/close() is generally not enough...