capture video from a built-in camera programatically

Question

I was wandering how could capture video from the built-in camera of my netbook, under Linux, ubuntu. The programming language could is not an issue (but I prefer Java or the old school c)

Thanks in advance for your answers, Gian

Answer 1

In Linux the canonical way of talking to webcams are via v4l.

Here is a library called libfg for a simple high level C API on top of v4l.