It seems this version is not affected by memory leak I notice in past..

Which codec is better handled by gsvideo? i tried quicktime full hd video and in quicktime is played without problem, but the same video in gsvideo runs at 15/16 fps.. 

I've only just updated yesterday but generally it looks like gsvideo 0.8 is performing much better than 0.7 both on linux & mac

As for getting better framerates in gsvideo, specially for full HD, the OpenGL plugins in gstreamer are probably the best alternative. Although it requires some work to get opengl, gstreamer and java nicely talking to each other.

Anyways, I found another method to better combine GSVideo and GLGraphics in order to reduce CPU usage. Still debugging it, but playback of HD videos seems better, at least on OSX. The test packages for GLGraphics and GSVideo that include the new method are here and here (build date 2011-04-11). Try the Movie/GLPlayback example with some HD clip. Using the xvid codec appears to be give better results than h264, at least for now.

1. set( int(random(-width, width)), int(random(-height,height)), cam);

It would also be good to check if you can get the camera working using gstreamer directly from the command line, in order to rule out any low-level issues (note that VLC is not based on gstreamer).

I'll see if I can get the camera running from the command line, like you suggested.