Steve Burkett wrote: > > hello, i have a few questions if you could answer? > > (1) in a nutshell, how does video for linux 2 (V4L2) differ from V4L1? Difficult to fit in a nutshell... v4l2 is a complete rewrite. While v4l1 was intended to be an interface to TV cards, v4l2 is intended as an interface to video capture cards, and includes all those things like codecs, multiple buffers, enumeratble formats and controls, timestamping, etc. > (2) can close captioning be captured? Yes (with a few minor technicalities) > (3) using V4L, how do you detect the capture video standard (NTSC/PAL/etc)? Don't know... > (4) do you happen to know what the primary capture devices that V4L supports > and major ones it doesnt? (or a website that lists them) I know of no centralised list for all v4l1 drivers. The list of v4l2 drivers is at http://www.thedirks.org/vl42. I think the notable absences are the zoran based cards (although I saw a v4l2 driver at some stage), and the ATI All-in-Wonder cards. There are also quite a few cards with only v4l2 drivers (although they should work through the backwards compatibility layer). > (5) can V4L doublebuffer? (to avoid exta mem copies of video frames?) Yes (but only 2 hardware buffers, no more. actually the API does allow for more, but without timestamping this would be pointless). -justin
