Considering the degree of realization,cost of manufacturing and upgrading,this paper introduces the design and implementation of wireless video monitoring terminals based on ARM and embedded Linux systems. The new idea of video capture based on V4L and the merits of video coding based on MPEG4 in the Linux systems are analysed.We described the difficulty of the whole system development and the corresponding solutions. Also, the implementation of wireless video monitoring terminals, the design of video capture, the encoding process of the XVID encoder and the optimization schemes of the MPEG4 video coding standard on the ARM platform are all given in this paper. After the actual video capture and encoding performance test based on the AMRLinux, the results show that the wireless monitoring terminals based on V4L and MPEG4 do well in realtime video capturing ,high compression efficiency and steady streams,and are fully able to meet the user’s needs on video monitoring.