Tuukka Toivonen (tuukkat@xxxxxxxxxx): > On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Gerd Knorr wrote: > > >gstreamer IMHO is overkill just for doing conversions. > > > >IMHO it would be better to put that into a small library which has > >just the conversion functions and nothing else. > > I don't think so: in a generic plugin system, parts of the driver could be > moved into userspace plugins. > > It's not just format conversion: there certainly is/will be hardware that > needs complex image processing and filtering for the incoming video, and > likely some features computed from the video image need to be fed back to > the driver to control the camera. > > For example, I get mjpeg-compressed video from the camera that I need to > uncompress and compute the image brightness. The brightness then controls > the camera exposure time. Another example: automatic focus control. > > Besides, users have asked me to implement things like flipping image upside > down in the driver, because they have mounted the camera into ceiling or > something. With a proper plugin system, this should be possible with all > video applications by just editing ~/.gstreamer.conf or something to tell > the pipeline that "insert somewhere a flip plugin". > > So I think that a big complex plugin system is needed, hopefully > Gstreamer. Regardless of whether the gstreamer idea is worth doing, the huge problem now is that there is no userspace code to just do the simple work of handling decompression for webcams that only offer images in odd compressed formats. Something as simple as this could get widea acceptance and solve much of our current problems. -Billy
