For anyone who wants to read data from mjpg-streamer, I've posted python code that can read from the stream using urllib + opencv.
http://www.virtualroadside.com/blog/...-using-opencv/
We ended up not using any image processing at our competition, but because our dashboard was created using HTML/js, it was trivially easy to connect to the camera and display its output. Highly recommend mjpg-streamer as a solution if you're only needing to display output on the Driver Station.