The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction [LWN.net]

The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction

Posted Oct 12, 2006 2:15 UTC (Thu) by patrickbakker (guest, #25247)
Parent article: The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction

I have read that the IVTV driver (for the Hauppage TV tuner cards amoung others) is moving away from its unique ioctls to more standard V4L2 ioctls. The primary agent of change is Hans Verkuil and I think he is working on fleshing out some of the V4L2 APIs to handle things like MPEG-II since the IVTV driver can capture video as a MPEG-II stream.

It may be useful to talk to Hans Verkuil for practical feedback on converting to V4L2 and for other portions of the V4L2 API like the MPEG-II stuff I already mentioned.

IVTV Driver

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The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction

Posted Oct 12, 2006 11:25 UTC (Thu) by hverkuil (subscriber, #41056) [Link]

Some background info:

As maintainer of ivtv I am working for over a year now to get it included
into the kernel. This turns out to be a huge job since in many ways this
driver is a first-of-its-kind driver.

Part of this effort is replacing ivtv-specific ioctls by a properly
designed V4L2 API: 2.6.14 added the sliced VBI API and 2.6.18 added the
API for encoding MPEG. The latter is not yet fully documented in the V4L2
spec (I'm working on that). Still to do is designing an MPEG decoding API
and (possibly, might remain ivtv-specific) an API for the On-Screen
Display. Designing such APIs is a time consuming process since MPEG
encoders/decoders are quite complicated.

I've no experience with converting V4L1 API to V4L2 API though since ivtv
always supported V4L2 AFAIK.