I am writing an application that needs to fetch screenshots from a video feed that can handle rawvideo.

I can pipe the data into mplayer and get perfect video, but mplayer does not have an API I can use.

I can pipe the data into VLC and get insanely slow video while VLC pins all four cores.

I can use the LIBVLC api and get the screenshots I need, but it still runs insanely slow, the API throws errors everywhere over BadDrawable (which, from my googling, seems to be an issue LIBVLC runs into when the hardware is not able to handle it, AKA Raspberry Pi's and Beaglebone Boards run into it).

So my question is, is there a leaner alternative to LIBVLC that I can use? Essentially something as lean as mplayer but that has an API that can be called from C code?

Thanks for your time, and sorry if this isn't "programming" specific enough for this sub.