On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 18:46, Scott Tillman wrote: > 1) Common consistent interface > To quote from: http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id=216 : > "You cannot satisfy the basic goal of a video I/O API--device > independence--unless there is a common set of scales, pixel formats, aspect > ratios, and crops that are supported by all devices" <snip> > 2) Hardware assistance/acceleration This would all come down to a userspace library, so let's take that as a starting point. The idea, in essence, is okay. Let's make one big lib to do it all and let everyone use it. There's just one practical problem, nobody will use it. People are often ignorant, they don't care or they just want to do it themselves. Have a look at gstreamer and see how many people/organizations (KDE's artsd?) are trying to do similar things. You can always try, it's just that it's not that easy in practice. > While I agree that V4L is minimal, I argue that it is *not* complete. The > tasks of scaling, cropping, gamma correction, de-interlacing, rotation and > color space conversion (and possibly others...for example closed > captioning/logo overlay support) are so common in video applications that a > video API lacking the ability to configure and/or provide them is > incomplete. I fully agree that some library needs these functions, just *not* the kernel-level library like libv4l that we were talking about. Image processing is a totally different thing. You can make a lib, but you shouldn't make an all-encompassing library that does cropping, scaling, denoising, bla, bli, blo et all together at once. That's insane! Use the unix principle, "keep it simple (stupid)" - KISS. Make a separate scaler, denoiser, colourspace convertor, etc. etc. etc., and keep it all separate. They're different things so they're different and should be kept that way. And just call it library, not "libv4l" or something else that makes it look like the core of everything. Because it's not. Ronald -- - .-. - /V\ | Ronald Bultje <rbultje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - // \\ | Running: Linux 2.4.18-XFS and OpenBSD 3.0 - /( )\ | http://ronald.bitfreak.net/ - ^^-^^
