Found and did some initial testing of "qv4l2 - A test bench application for video4linux devices".
This program allows the capture of single frames or streams of frames at selectable frame rates (5, 10 or 15 fps) either in black and white or color. The display is done via mplayer as default. Apparently the default format of the stream is MPEG.
The graphical interface allows detailed control of the various camera parameters.