Bill,
In general the image_transport infrastructure is recommended for all this http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_transport I put more specific info inline below.
Tully
Hello,
Right now I have a camera on a robot running ROS, and I'm trying to
figure out how to set things up to meet my needs.
1) The robot currently has a USB camera but may need to use Firewire in
the future. Ideally whatever solution should work for both cases. The
baseline requirement is to get a 320x240x10fps color video or image
stream.
2) I have 1-2 vision tasks I would like to be performed locally on the
robot.
3) I would like to transmit the video/image stream to a ground station
using TCP/IP so I don't have multiple radios on the robot.
4) The ground station should be able to display the video/images and
perform computer vision tasks on the data.
5) The video should be logged for disk so that it can be fed back into
the system for debugging.