The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction

Posted Oct 12, 2006 11:25 UTC (Thu) by hverkuil (subscriber, #41056)
In reply to: The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction by patrickbakker
Parent article: The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction

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.