Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 21:03:41 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <aa8vb@nc.rr.com> To: multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: TV Users - Let me bounce this off you Message-ID: <20000525210340.A44725@nc.rr.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Been thinking about a way to make writing TV apps easier (not just
easy; trivial!). An API that would allow folks to literally write their
own in Python or Tcl TV app with 5-10 lines of code.
If you like the idea, read on. My thought is to embed all the
"configure, capture, convert, and blast" needed for a TV client of any sort
into a daemon. An app wanting video data in some format would simply say:
tv.Connect()
tv.Configure()
tv.Start()
tv.Stop()
tv.Close()
something along those lines.
Does this kind of interface interest anyone?
Potential clients would be, for example, GUI applications, one-shot
frame grabbers, webcams, on-the-fly MPEG encoders, etc.
Potential destinations for the video data would be: any X Window
(created by Tk, wxWindows, Motif, ...whatever!), the frame buffer, a
socket, named pipe, file(s), memory buffer (user, XImage, XvShmImage), raw
device, ...
Possible video sources are, of course, the TV cards (either directly
though the driver API or indirectly via the new Xv extension).
BTW, GUI apps would simply say "here; take this X Window", and the
daemon would take care of all the rest (determine src and dest pixel
format, configure and fire up the TV driver, handle any format conversions
necessary [and FAST! -- using MMX if available], possibly changing between
XImage and DGA transfer automagically, using Shared memory, YUV images, or
whatever capture/convert/transfer path supported is fastest on your box, ...)
Basically, the idea is to bury all the low-level nastiness in the
daemon so users don't have to care about driver capture formats, pixel
format conversions, available X protocols, throttling, etc.
Hermes or SDL might be good libraries to use under-the-hood to do the
the pixel format conversion (Hermes already has MMX support; been testing
it recently with bktr TV and it looks promising).
Anyway, thanks for reading. Please fire off any opinions, for or
against. No sense in spending time on this if desire for it is just
lukewarm.
--
Randall Hopper
aa8vb@nc.rr.com
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000525210340.A44725>