Gstreamer support in HAL?

[Danny Kukawka]

On Montag, 19. November 2007, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> 2007/10/31, Martin Szulecki <compiz at sukimashita.com>:
> > Seems there was a v4l patch once which did not went upstream (could not
> > find a reason though why it didn't).
> >
> > It would probably be good to have it upstream and it allows you to
> > differ between the capabilities you described.
> >
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-June/008780.html
>
> Are there any plans on merging the patch? It looks very useful.

I take a look at it.

> Now for my proposition of also exposing gstreamer capabilities of
> multimedia devices, attached is a set of fdi files for some webcams
> and tv tuners.
>
> Does it make sense? Is it possible to merge this with hal-info? I
> opted not to probe this info upon device discovery as many v4l v1
> devices take a while to initialize and thus the detecting part could
> easily take up to half a minute.
>
> Waiting for comments.

I'm not sure if we should add such a amount of information to HAL. IMO 
gstreamer should hold the information but not HAL. At least such key/property 
values are somehow bloated also because you have devices with >= 48 of such 
lines:

<append key="gstreamer.capabilities" type="strlist">video/x-raw-yuv, 
width=(int)176, height=(int)144, framerate=(fraction)25/1, 
format=(fourcc)I420</append>

This fill the memory permanently with information which may never needed. Is 
there no way for userspace tools to probe/get this info? 

I would currently vote against add these fdi files to HAL atm. 

Danny