ACGT counts from mpileup

[kgulukota]

I would like to get the counts of A/C/G/T high quality bases aligned at each position from a bam file.

I know that 'samtools mpileup' gives a string with actual read bases and their quality scores ("reads" and "quals" in example below). So, yes I can parse it. But is there a ready-made option for this?

Chr      pos     Ref     Dep    Reads     Quals
1	3000016	A	5	..C.^~.	/<%A?

I also know that the '-u' option gives something similar in the I16 filed (number of bases in forward and reverse strand which are ref or non-ref) but not quite the full A/C/G/T count.

So, is parsing each mpileup line my only option? (Are there other programs, say picard, which might be better suited for this?)

Thanks,
Gulu