Can I encode images to an mpeg 1 at a time

[Matt_K]

Hi there.
I am developing some software for Nikon DSLRs for animation. I want to make a reference movie of the animation as it progresses. Each time my software captures an image (jpeg) from the camera I would like to add the image to a movie so at any point the animator can check the look of the shot. Is this possible?

[check]

I don't think you can do this with MPEG1, but I think you can do this with MJPEG, which is essentially a string of JPEGs. Rather large, but it could be possible. You can't decode this in realtime either. Essentially what you would want to do is encode the first frame as a 1 frame MJPEG avi file, and then for every additional frame, encode as a single frame MJPEG and then append onto the ongoing movie.
Upon thinking about it you could probably do this with any media format that can fit in the AVI container as long as you did it one frame at a time, if you did it as xvid or something the file would be able to be played back in realtime and would be a lot smaller.