[gst-devel] V4lsrc customization (looking for dev for hire)

[Christopher Brooks]

Hi,

I'm a developer/manager involved with an open source project
(www.opencastproject.org) that relies on gstreamer for some of our base
functionality.  We're using a vga capture device with the v4lsrc element to
record the desktop of faculty, and send this along with other video for
processing for the web.  The device we have, the Epiphan VGA2USB, doesn't
have a driver that pads frames when there is no signal.  Instead, the v4lsrc
fails when reading from the frame buffer and disrupts the filter chain.
This is a pretty big problem, as it causes recording of all streams (we bin
a bunch together) grinds to a halt.  Turns out that our domain (academic
lectures) often has this kind of issue (picture faculty unplugging vga from
one laptop into another).  To this end, we've been encouraging users of our
system to use it with a DA scaler to ensure there is always a vga signal
being sent to our capture hardware.

Our system lives in the java/flex/html/css world, so developers with lower
level C skills are rare, and gstreamer is a big toolkit.  As we're an OSS
project, I thought I would see if there was anyone who would be willing to
help out adding a "pad frame" feature to the v4lsrc element to handle this
kind of issue.  We have no interest in owning the IP for this customization;
ideally it would be contributed upstream and into the gstreamer core.  We
may have some limited financial resources depending on the amount of effort
this would take.

Any takers?  We have some ideas of where it should be solved in the code,
but the build process seems quite daunting...

Chris