Video streaming for surveillance camera

[Curtis Vaughan <curtis@npc-usa.com>]

I'm trying to set up a video surveillance camera on a Debian 2.6.x box.

I have some sort of a btx video card with a rca attached camera. I also 
have a no-name usb camera on it as well.

Using webcam I can get still pictures from the rca camera. However, all 
attempts to get a streaming video using ffmpeg on the same device show 
only some static image. I haven't really tried to get the usb camera to 
work as ultimately only rca cameras will be used.

How do I go about figuring out why I am only getting static with ffmpeg?

For webcam the device is on /dev/video0 which is what I address ffmpeg 
to.

The command I am using with ffmpeg is:
ffmpeg -vd /dev/video0 -an -s 326x288 /tmp/video_test.avi

I have also tried:
ffmpeg -vd /dev/video0 -an -r 10 -s 326x288 /tmp/video_test.avi
but the rate parameter seems to make little difference.