thanks dariusgeo - that totally worked! But as you suggested - i had to follow the installation instructions *exactly*. Superb.
Now i just need to figure out how to convert the video feed into a opengl compatible texture. I feel like that may be a much taller order than i was originally anticipating though...
EDIT: maybe not so bad after all. opencv.pixels() seems to be plenty fast:
videoTex.putBuffer(opencv.pixels(opencv.BUFFER));
gets my video into opengl quite nicely.