[AG-TECH] WebCam

[Piers O'Hanlon]

Hi Doug,

The UCL version of vic already supports V4l2 see:
https://mediatools.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mbone/mmedia/wiki/VicDownload
https://mediatools.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mbone/mmedia/browser/vic/trunk/video/grabber-v4l2.cpp

There are still a number of drivers in the kernel (including some for
webcams) that are still video4linux version one only - Now all video
capture devices are listed as /dev/video - one has to open the devices
and see which ones can be opened with V4L1 or V4L2 - thus the UCL
version compiles both drivers.

We are in the process having the AG features ported into the UCL
version of vic - either by ANL or by UCL, we also plan to integrate
work from NCHC vic - under our SUMOVER project - as mentioned by me at
the recent AG retreat.

We would welcome any developer work on vic - we are keen to bring on
board any active developers and potentially provide commit access to
the SVN repository.

Thanks,

Piers O'Hanlon
------
Computer Science Dept.
University College London

On 6/8/06, Douglas Kosovic <douglask at itee.uq.edu.au> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> > I'm specifically after a webcam to set up on my desktop machine that
> > will work with AG2.4 and 3.  My OS is Ubuntu 6.06 but I'm not to sure if
> > the AGTK has been packaged up for it yet, so will probably just dual
> > boot Fedora.
> >
> > Is there any recommended webcams?
>
> AG vic and the AccessGrid toolkit are using the video4linux ver 1 API, not
> the newer V4L2. This hasn't been a real problem in the past, as the majority
> of the V4L2 drivers came with a V4L compatibility layer. But now as V4L
> support is going to be dropped from newer kernels soon, the newer V4L2
> drivers tend to only support the V4L2 API.
>
> So AG 2.4 and 3.0.1 doesn't work with the new Linux UVC (USB Video Class)
> driver:
>  http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/
> which will only support V4L2.
>
> I'm in the process of modifying vic to use V4L2 (with support for multiple
> colour-space formats as used by webcams) and modifying the AGTk code to use
> V4L2 to interrogate the video capture devices. I'm using the PWC webcam
> driver (note: I don't think PWC capable webcams are still sold.) for
> testing. I might have something ready in the next couple of weeks.
>
> I will probably retrofit V4L2 support for AG2.4 Fedora RPMs.
>
>
> Doug
>
>
>