Gstreamer support in HAL?

[Martin Szulecki]

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

--- M.S.

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 14:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> 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.
>