Re: Termination of the Philips Webcam Driver (pwc)

[Marek Habersack <grendel@caudium.net>]

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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.

regards,

marek

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