Gstreamer support in HAL?

[Patryk Zawadzki]

Hi,

I happen to be one of the developers of Cheese - a webcam application
similar to Apple's photobooth. Having to support a huge number of
devices we hit some walls on our road to success. It also seems we are
not the only ones having to reinvent the wheel to support all the
devices properly. Among the devices esolutions and output formats are
nowhere near standardized. Another problem is looking at a bunch of
video devices and having to guess which are cameras and which are
TV-cards or frame grabbers. There is no clear distinction between
those at the HAL level.

To solve the first part I created a simple hack in Python to enumerate
devices, the ouput should be a directly mergable fdi file for HAL.
This results in devices having proper names and correctly listing
supported caps.

This is important so the application can choose the appropriate ones
without the need to initialize the device before enumeration which is
a very costly process in case of most V4L drivers. That's the main
reason I went for static fdi files as opposed to a binary started by
HAL.

If it is decided that such information might be useful for the general
crowd, I'd be willing to collect the information I just lack the
exposure, help from sub-projects such as Richard Hughes' HAL quirks
page would be appreciated.

The second is a harder one. Is there any standard way to tell the
cameras/frame grabbers/TV tuners apart? If so, such information should
probably be merged into "capabilities" at HAL level too.

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki
PLD Linux Distribution