MJPG-streamer is a very lightweight and resource friendly video streamer. It also comes with uvc_stream, which is a very basic streamer, and uvc_viewer, a simple gtk viewing application. MJPG-streamer takes JPGs from Linux-UVC compatible webcams, filesystem or other input plugins and streams them as M-JPEG via HTTP to webbrowsers, VLC and other software. It is the successor of uvc-streamer, a Linux-UVC streaming application with Pan/Tilt Homepage: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mjpg-streamer/ Note: The included uvc_viewer is a 32bit binary and therefore will not work on other archs. You may use mplayer to watch the stream using a similar command to: mplayer -fps 30 -demuxer lavf -cache 256 \ "http://192.168.1.2:8080/?action=stream&ignored.mjpg" You may find that mplayer is lighter on resources anyway. Also the viewer leaves a properties.ini file in the CWD. There is an included start.sh script which contains many examples for using the mjpg_streamer application. (The www directory mentioned should be replaced by /var/mjpg-www.) You can find it and more in /usr/doc/mjpg-streamer-$version