Hi All,
First time poster, long-time fan.
I'm using a raspberry pi (debian flavour) with a USB webcam. The most effective way to display the video from the webcam is to launch mplayer directly from the console (no xwindows).
This is relatively simple:
However, the default settings mplayer uses for the webcam are terrible. Brightness, contrast and saturation all need heavy adjustments. I can set these in V4L2 using commands like this:
However, mplayer seems to reset the V4L2 values every time it launches, erasing the modifications I made through the v4l2-ctl command.

Using the the Pi's default graphical interface environment, I have determined that it is possible to change the V4L2 values while mplayer is running, and I get the result that I want.

However, this is where I need help: when running mplayer from the command line, and outputting the video to the framebuffer, I'm not sure how I would be able to run those V4L2 commands while A) mplayer is occupying the terminal such that no other commands may be entered, and B) the full screen is occupied by the framebuffer video.

I tried a couple different strategies of bash script, and I tried the "screen" program. Neither seemed to do what I hoped. However, I'm a relative novice at both. Would someone be able to point me in the direction of some Linux magic that would help me to accomplish what I need to do?

Thanks so much,
Matt

Haha!
For anyone else looking to do this (in my Google adventure prior to posting this question, I appeared not to be the only one):

mplayer can be set into a slave mode where you can feed it more commands. Among those commands is the "run" command which can run a terminal command enclosed in quotation marks. You can also direct commands into mplayer from a file. Combined, these two features lead to a solution:

create a file with the mplayer commands you wish to give. My file is called "v4l-mplayer-settings". The file consists of the following:
Then I run this command in the terminal (or from a bash script):
the -vo flag and the following sdl:driver=fbcon may be particular to my system, as a lot of people suggest using fbdev instead of fbcon. This sends your video to the framebuffer. It may be optional to set this if you are running the mplayer command from the console without any x software running.

-slave puts mplayer in slave mode to accept commands
-quiet is meant to provide you an mplayer-specific command line where you can feed mplayer commands via the keyboard. I'm not sure if it's required if you use -input file. However, it doesn't hurt.
-input file= is where I direct mplayer to use the commands I included in the above v4l-mplayer-settings file.
-tv indicates that we are setting properties for the tv device, using video for linux 2 (which is what I need to use to access my webcam), and the device at /dev/video0 (which is the video device of my webcam - your system may be different.
Finally, tv:// just directs mplayer to invoke its TV viewer system.

After hours of fiddling with a Raspberry Pi, different webcams and infinite repetitions of "google / trial / error", I finally found this post. Your solution works for me. Thank you very, very much.