Brandon Philips wrote: > On 09:39 Sat 29 Sep 2007, Michel Xhaard wrote: >> Le Vendredi 28 Septembre 2007 20:01, Greg KH a ?crit : >>> On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 07:38:17PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: >>>> Greg KH wrote: >>>>> On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 02:13:37PM +0200, Bertrik Sikken wrote: >>>>>> Many webcam drivers are consequently maintained out of the >>>>>> official kernel and *DO* include decompression and bayer >>>>>> conversion to at least get webcams into a workable state. >>>>>> (Examples, there are many more: >>>>>> * Philips PWC driver: http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ >>>>>> * Various other drivers: http://www.linux-projects.org >>>>>> * Spca driver: http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html ) >>>>>> >>>>>> 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. >>>>>> * as above, instead of library, use gstreamer plug-ins (each compressed >>>>>> webcam format would have its own plugin, with perhaps a single plugin >>>>>> for unbayering). >>>>>> * bypass the kernel drivers entirely and use libusb to talk to the >>>>>> webcams. A problem is that (AFAIK) libusb does not support >>>>>> isochronous USB transfers and many cameras use this transfer mode. >>>>>> >>>>>> Any thoughts on how to improve Linux webcam support? >>>>> Yes, work with the existing Linux video driver developers. They need >>>>> all the help they can get. >>>>> More information about them can be found at http://linuxtv.org >>>>> That being said, I have no objection to people helping on this project >>>>> to take some of the current out-of-tree drivers and cleaning them up to >>>>> get them included in the main kernel source tree. That would be an >>>>> immense help that the people here could provide. >>>>> Does anyone want to pick up one of the above mentioned drivers, or any >>>>> of the other ones floating around on the net, and do this? >>>> Actually I've been toying with the idea to work on the UVC webcam driver >>>> to make it suitable for upstream / mainstream kernel merging. I haven't >>>> contacted the UVC developers about this yet, as I've been swamped with >>>> other stuff. >>> There is already a developer, Brandon (on the CC:) who is actively >>> working on this. You might want to work with him, if he needs any help. >>> His response might be delayed as he is traveling this weekend across >>> the globe... >> Is Brandon working with the Linux UVC team ? You should forward to the >> uvcvideo mailing list !! > > Yes, I will once I have working patches :) I took a quick detour to > fix up the vivi driver against the latest videobuf code. > > http://linuxtv.org/hg/~mchehab/videobuf/ > > The two things that need to be done to get UVC in are moving to > videobuf instead of using uvc_queue.c and moving the ioctls to > video_ioctl2. > > Cheers, > > Brandon > I've got a UVC webcam (logitech sphere) over here let me know if I can help with testing. Also talking about the logitech sphere, it has the ability to turn left/right and up/down, currently it uses custom IOCTL's for this and so do some other drivers which can drive camera's with the same feature, I believe we need to add some standard ioctl's for this (including one to query for this capability), so that userspace apps can use this feature without having to write support for it for each driver seperately. Regards, hans
