From owner-freebsd-multimedia Tue Jan 18 1:28:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Received: from rah.star-gate.com (216-200-29-190.snj0.flashcom.net [216.200.29.194]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C561814DD3 for ; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:28:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from hasty@rah.star-gate.com) Received: from rah.star-gate.com (localhost.star-gate.com [127.0.0.1]) by rah.star-gate.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id BAA20178; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:26:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from hasty@rah.star-gate.com) Message-Id: <200001180926.BAA20178@rah.star-gate.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: Roger Hardiman Cc: Jaeckel Joachim , "'freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org'" Subject: Re: something like video4linux the 2. (some thoughts...) In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 18 Jan 2000 08:41:40 GMT." <38842744.2747018@cs.strath.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 01:26:25 -0800 From: Amancio Hasty Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi Roger, Let me try to make it even clearer we need a major push on the application side. We can spend man years doing cool low level driver stuff however the fact remains who is going to write the apps. I understand there will be rare occasions for linux commercial video offerings but for now they will be just few . It is a simple matter of management and strategy : Where should we spend our precious man-efforts. a. Doing low level driver stuff? b. Writing cool multimedia apps? We can have the multimedia applications dictate how and where should we spend our kernel man-efforts or we can sort of keep doing what we have been doing since the start of the multimedia group: Code up the low level kernel interfaces and drivers then pray that the applications people will come along and do the coding. My intuition and experience tells me that is time for a change... Best Regards > Amancio, > > > What you want is more video capture device drivers for different video > > capture boards using the bt848 ioctl interface which is sufficiently general > > to accomodate most video capture programs. > > I agree that the API the Bt848/878 driver has is nice and has served > us well over the years. > > One cannot ignore the growing number of V4L apps, including commercial > ones like the RealMedia Video Server. Even SANE is adding > a V4L interface to grab frames from a camera and V4L is being used by > OpenH323 (the opensource NetMeeting clone) > > Of course, we can write stubs for SANE and OpenH323 for our API. > But as commercial companies write for V4L, it would be handy for us to > support it too. > > > We just need that magical expert who can learn V4L and can add it > to the driver. > > > Roger > -- > Roger Hardiman > Strathclyde Uni Telepresence Research Group, Glasgow, Scotland. > http://www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk 0141 548 2897 > roger@cs.strath.ac.uk > > -- Amancio Hasty hasty@rah.star-gate.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message