Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 21:03:41 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <aa8vb@nc.rr.com> To: multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: TV Users - Let me bounce this off you Message-ID: <20000525210340.A44725@nc.rr.com>
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Been thinking about a way to make writing TV apps easier (not just easy; trivial!). An API that would allow folks to literally write their own in Python or Tcl TV app with 5-10 lines of code. If you like the idea, read on. My thought is to embed all the "configure, capture, convert, and blast" needed for a TV client of any sort into a daemon. An app wanting video data in some format would simply say: tv.Connect() tv.Configure() tv.Start() tv.Stop() tv.Close() something along those lines. Does this kind of interface interest anyone? Potential clients would be, for example, GUI applications, one-shot frame grabbers, webcams, on-the-fly MPEG encoders, etc. Potential destinations for the video data would be: any X Window (created by Tk, wxWindows, Motif, ...whatever!), the frame buffer, a socket, named pipe, file(s), memory buffer (user, XImage, XvShmImage), raw device, ... Possible video sources are, of course, the TV cards (either directly though the driver API or indirectly via the new Xv extension). BTW, GUI apps would simply say "here; take this X Window", and the daemon would take care of all the rest (determine src and dest pixel format, configure and fire up the TV driver, handle any format conversions necessary [and FAST! -- using MMX if available], possibly changing between XImage and DGA transfer automagically, using Shared memory, YUV images, or whatever capture/convert/transfer path supported is fastest on your box, ...) Basically, the idea is to bury all the low-level nastiness in the daemon so users don't have to care about driver capture formats, pixel format conversions, available X protocols, throttling, etc. Hermes or SDL might be good libraries to use under-the-hood to do the the pixel format conversion (Hermes already has MMX support; been testing it recently with bktr TV and it looks promising). Anyway, thanks for reading. Please fire off any opinions, for or against. No sense in spending time on this if desire for it is just lukewarm. -- Randall Hopper aa8vb@nc.rr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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