On 09/28/2007 02:13 PM, Bertrik Sikken wrote: > Hi all, > > A couple of years ago I worked on getting some webcams working > with Linux. To be honest, I was unpleasantly surprised. > There seems to be a lack of direction on how webcams > are even supposed to be supported. > > The problem is that many USB webcams send raw 'bayer' sensor > data in a compressed form to the PC in order to get reasonable > frames-per-second over a full-speed (12 Mb/s) USB connection > AFAIK, the linux kernel developers decided that is was no longer > allowed to do decompression and bayer format conversion in the kernel. Exactly. > Some ideas: > * create a user-space library for webcams that reads the compressed > data from a v4l(2) device file, decompresses and unbayers it, > then exposes it through a standard API to applications. This idea is already in progress: v4l library. [Needed also for stk11xx (only in -mm due to not having yet another bayer->rgb conversion in the kernel) and usbvision (in v4l yet).] Thierry Merle <thierry.merle at free.fr>: http://thierry.merle.free.fr/v4l2_extension/general.html regards, -- Jiri Slaby (jirislaby at gmail.com) Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
