Help reading .yuv files

[lotsoflayne]

Hi guys first time posting here. I am doing a project where I want to take a video stream from a webcam, put it into YUV 4:2:0 format and organize it so I can see the y values, u values, and v values. So right now I have a clip in yuv format, how do I look at the y values, u values, and v values for each frame? I tried opening the file with notepad and all I see is gibberish. I am very new to video files and encoding, and any help or suggestions will be much appreciated.

thanks

[tomlee59]

First question one would ask (so I'll ask it), is why? Note that there are many pixels in each frame, and each (group of) pixels in a frame will have a different YUV value. What are you going to do with all of this data? We're talking more bits than a human can manually parse in a reasonable time, so I'm assuming that you intend to have some software operate on it. What's it supposed to do?

And are you sure that the webcam is providing information in this format?