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Re: load & brightness

On Wed, 24 Jan 1996, Thomas Davis wrote:

> The answer to this is "No, not really."  Again, the problem appears
> interface, and everyone uses that.

I've also noticed the lack of any standard...  I'm gonna look at the 
IndyCam stuff that was just posted to the list tommorow.  If this stuff 
is useful, then we should consider molding a standard out of it.  
Otherwise, we'll just play it by ear.

> Standard IOCTL's, reading the frame buffer, syncing frames, and whatever
> else is good in my opinion  (oh, oh, here it comes..  ICAM, the Internet
> Camera And Motion standard.  naahhh.)

This would be very good..  As soon as I get my QuickCam back, I'm gonna 
finish that kernel driver (Shouldn't take long).

> That's it. Simple, eh?  You can do "cat < /dev/quickcam > /tmp/snapshot",
> and get a raw file with whatever the default settings of the quickcam are..
> Really.  You want PGM?  Make a /dev/qcpgm, or /dev/qcraw to get PGM, raw..
> (note - these don't exist yet, but on my list of things to do...)

I'm not really sure you'd want PGM in the kernel.  It'll probably be 
better to just write a simple user program to grab frames and dump them 
into PGM format.  Keep the kernel simple! :)

> I really want to be able to use a seperate program to control the camera
> from the program reading the data.  That way, on systems with good thread
> or multiple processor support, you can maximize the performance..

The seperate program is also a very good way to abstract the control of 
the camera; this allows user programs like the mbone-tools to just worry 
about grabbing frames.

> I'm game for changing the interface to what is defined.  But, I'm not
> game for changing it multiple times.  Let's get one standard, that _any_
> Unix system (BSD, SysV, UnixWare,  Solaris x86) can at least support. 
> (Sorry OS/2 and NT people..)  Maybe even get the library and the drivers
> to be _one_ package...  Pick it up, and the package builds the library,
> and then uses THAT to build the driver for your system..  (in fact, One
> True Package would be really, really nice..)

Agreed.  Let's first aim for standardization of the Linux, FreeBSD, and 
NetBSD kernel drivers.  I'll take care of the *BSD drivers and you take 
care of the Linux one.  This will at least give us decent cross-platform 
support for the user-programs like xfqcam (and maybe even allow other 
architectures with parallel ports to use QuickCams).

I'm going implement a driver thats mostly compatible with yours, and then
we'll discuss what kind of adjustments we'd like to make before 
standardization.


Sujal
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