Video4Linux2 part 7: Controls

Posted Sep 7, 2007 12:27 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
Parent article: Video4Linux2 part 7: Controls

After failing to find a way of zooming and panning my webcam under ekiga, and seeing the V4L2 spec, I wondered "does V4L2 introduce the capability of doing this?" Alas, as far as I can see, it doesn't. Digital cropping yes, but optical zooming, or panning, no.

The 110MB Windows foistware package that came with the webcam can do it though, so it definitely should be a capability of V4L2, no?

Video4Linux2 part 7: Controls

Posted Sep 7, 2007 15:09 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You're talking about driving physical servos that control the camera's position and optics? I don't know, that's awfully specialized... It would take some work by a dedicated programmer with a few servo-controlled webcams to design a good, general purpose interface.

There *is* motion support for a few webcams using private IOCTLs. Have you seen the VIDIOCPWCMPT ioctls on http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/PWC/ApplicationProgr... ?

And here's an application that uses them (I think): http://www.fastpath.it/products/palantir/faq.html#7