Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 09:27:41 +0200 From: Marco Molteni <molter@tin.it> To: Carlos Ugarte <cau@cs.arizona.edu> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: writing a driver for the IBM ultraport camera (USB) Message-ID: <20020517072741.9472.qmail@cobweb.example.org> In-Reply-To: <15588.12506.65605.999864@pc-ugarte.research.att.com> References: <20020516091509.1671.qmail@cobweb.example.org> <15588.12506.65605.999864@pc-ugarte.research.att.com>
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[Bcc to -multimedia] On Thu, 16 May 2002 18:21:14 -0400, Carlos Ugarte <cau@cs.arizona.edu> wrote: > I'm working on a similar project - a FreeBSD driver for the Philips > webcams based on the Linux pwc driver. It's nowhere near working yet, > but I've learned a few things that may help you along the way. [..] Hi Carlos, thanks for the detailed answer, and thanks for taking the time of writing a real answer instead of quickly jotted words :-) Thanks also for the suggestion on which driver to use as a starting point. I already thought of using USB snoopy to get a dump of the protocol exchange. Regarding the Philips webcam you are working on, I am wondering how you will handle the decompression part, which as you know is done in Linux by a binary only driver for NDA reasons. I have a question on the USB architecture. From my limited understanding the various USB devices are divided in "classes", for example storage, or human interface like a mouse. Each class of device is supposed to have a specific API in addition to the generic USB one. On the USB web site I was able to find the class document for still video cameras, but it seems there is nothing regarding, what's the english for it, continuous video cameras. Are you aware of any standard for these devices? > Further down the line there is the issue of what kind of interface > should be provided to user space. [..] Exactly! I know nothing about video, but I understand it would be crazy (or masochistic) to provide a different API per video driver. I am aware too of video4linux, which good or bad is at least a standard. Looking for a standard I found SANE (http://www.mostang.com/sane/) which is or tries to be the Unix (better?) equivalent of TWAIN. Although SANE means Scanner Access Now Easy, it talks also about video cameras. Any ideas on this? marco To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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