hey, i have a large collection of jpgs (from a webcam, taken every 30 seconds) and i was wondering if there was a way to piece these together into an mpg/avi (video format) somehow? does anyone have any suggestions?

hmmm...
this i just a guess, but i know mEncoder is part of Mplayer.
and mPlayer is capable of converting Mpeg's to jpeg frames.

so maybe mEncoder can do the oposite ?

look it up.

sure, you can do it using mencoder.... you have to install mplayer in your box, then use this line

mencoder mf://*.jpeg -mf fps=25 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:pred=2:format=422P:vstrict=-1 -noskip -o file.avi

fps = frames per second (25 o 30 should be fine)
-ovc lavc = to use the lavc codec library (it comes with mplayer) with options specified by -lavcopts
vcodec = huffyuv, it's a loss-less codec it helps you to create a smaller file (smaller than creating the video without using any codecs at all)
pred = 2, use median prediction for huffyuv
format = 422P, define the yuv color space (this is the best possible quality)
vstrict = flag necessary to enable huffyuv coding
-noskip = keep all frames for encoding

you can test the result with "mplayer -vo x11 file.avi"

later you can encode your movie with the DivX-like codec, using mencoder also.