wacaw is a little command-line tool for Mac OS X that allows you to capture both still pictures and video from an attached camera. It is a very simple and small program that follows the UNIXish philosophy of doing only one thing, but thoroughly. :-)
That's what makes wacaw an ideal tool for system administrators and Uberusers, it's flexibility allows it to be integrated in shell scripts, Automator actions, AppleScript projects etc.
The video recording feature allows the user to create videos of pre-defined length, a useful feature for e.g. a surveillance application that captures a video if motion is detected.
wacaw is a spare-time project, with currently only two developers working on it. However, that doesn't mean we can't get the feature you need in! So, don't hesitate to report bugs and request new features, we'll get'em done eventually. :)
See the basic usage help below for more details on wacaw's parameters:
Usage: ./wacaw [-h] [options] [filename]
-h / --help : print this help message
--usage : print this help message
-v / --version : prints out version information
--verbose : more messages about what is going on
--brief : fewer messages about what is going on (default)
--video : record a video
--no-audio : do not record audio
-D / --duration <#>: specify the duration of the video (default: 15 sec.)
--to-clipboard: copy image just taken to clipboard
--jpeg : save image in JPEG format (default)
--tiff : save image in TIFF format
--png : save image in PNG format
--gif : save image in GIF format
--bmp : save image in BMP format
-x / --width <#> : specify the width of the image / video
-y / --height <#> : specify the height of the image / video
--SVGA : the image / video should have 'SVGA' size (800x600)
--VGA : the image / video should have 'VGA' size (640x480)
--CIF : the image / video should have 'CIF' size (352x288)
--SIF : the image / video should have 'SIF' size (320x240)
--QCIF : the image / video should have 'QCIF' size (176x144)
--QSIF : the image / video should have 'QSIF' size (160x120)
--SQSIF : the image / video should have 'SQSIF' size (160x96)
-L / --list-devices : list the devices available
-d / --video-device <#> : specify which device should be used
filename : needed unless only listing available devices (-L)
or using help (-h)