Hello everybody! There is a public domain software called ImageJ used widely in biology. It comes with source code and documentation; and a lot, if not all, of the functions and capabilities for image and video processing can be used for octave. I try to do it myself, but i'm still learning and there's still a lot more to learn. Among the non-processing tools there's image and video importing code for a large list of different formats. It's entirely written in Java. Here are a couple of links: