Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

[Dmitry Torokhov <dtor_core@ameritech.net>]

On Friday 27 August 2004 05:49 pm, Marek Habersack wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 11:42:30PM +0200, Nemosoft Unv. scribbled:
> [snip]
> > > So I'd personally much prefer the user mode approach. At that point it's
> > > still closed-source, but at least there is not even a whiff of a "hook"
> > > inside the kernel.
> > 
> > My problem with that is that it makes using such cams a lot harder for both 
> > users and developers of webcam tools. Basicly, every tool that wanted to 
> > use webcam X that has some binary-only library would need to specifically 
> > support it, use probing routines, check which formats are supported, set up 
> > the decompressor, push the data through it, etc. Conversely, every user 
> > that wanted to use webcams X, Y and Z would need to check first if they are 
> > all supported by the program(s) he would like to use.
> Forgive me if I'm talking bullshit, but wouldn't it be possible for you to
> route the stream through a device with an entry in /dev/ which would be
> opened by a userspace daemon which would take the stream from the in-kernel
> pwc driver, apply all the codec magic to it, and then give it back to the
> driver in the kernel so that the application that grabs the frames would get
> the processed data? That way you would need only one userlevel daemon to
> support the codecs and all the other apps would just read the data from the
> framebuffer.
> 

I wonder if something like uinput is possible/desirable for v4l?

-- 
Dmitry