Converter that converts videos into a custom video format

Question

I need to make a compressed video format for an 8-bit microcontroller to make a video player. The microcontroller cannot play big formats because they use too much memory and CPU time. I had an idea of my own codec and how the picture should be compressed and decompressed. However, I don't know how to convert videos from other formats which I have no idea about into my own format.

Is there an already existing video converter that passes bitmap data of each frame into my codec algorithm and vice versa?

P.S. I can take care of audio. Audio just needs to be transfered via SPI to an audio codec chip.

Answer 1

ffmpeg should be able to do this.

Refer to this answer on SO for details

That answer references the command line, but ffmpeg is also available as a library if it's more convenient to you.

Answer 2

OpenCV has a large number of tools for doing almost exactly the sort of thing that you are talking about - you can even use it from within python to read frames into a numpy array, (as here), use numpy to operate on it and the write it out to a new video.