I hope to have clarified the importance of defining a hardware- independent standard for preview images, for processing of preview images by applications (i.e., image processing, computer vision, augmented reality, etc). A standard preview image format is an absolute requirement for making Android future-proof for when other Android phones with other image sensors hit the market. Application developers cannot and should not keep track of increasing diversity in (future) native image sensor formats. Under Microsoft Windows too, it is the responsibility of the webcam manufacturer/vendor to provide drivers that offer standard VfW or WDM programming interfaces to the Windows application developer, no matter what the native image sensor data format is for the webcam's sensor.
I do not care *what* standard you pick, YCbCr420SP, YCbCr422, whatever, as long as there will be at least ONE documented standard preview format for the data[] in onPreviewFrame() that must be supported at application level by all Android camera phones, plus for performance reasons matching support by BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray (). Mapping between any native preview format and standard preview format (in data[]) must be done at camera device driver level. Lacking that, development of camera-based processing on Android phones will become a maintenance headache (read: an unmanageable mess and a reason to pick another platform). I am surprised that the Android Team does not yet indicate that they will tackle this key issue. There is more to it than mere bug fixing. I can today already work around the current G1 camera bugs after I recently reverse engineered its peculiarities with testing help from other developers represented in this group, so that is much less important to me than ensuring that my (and other people's) apps will not immediately break on the next Android phone because of non- standardized/unspecified/unsupported camera preview formats in Google Android, and the lack of a clear minimum spec with respect to required support for at least one standard camera preview format. The Android SDK 1.0 r1 documentation for setPreviewFormat() currently reads "pixel_format - the desired preview picture format (PixelFormat.YCbCr_422_SP, PixelFormat.RGB_565, or PixelFormat.JPEG). Apart from the asynchronous processing quirks, the T-Mobile G1 currently supports NONE of these documented formats (with their corresponding format headers), or else one could have applied BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(). Instead, the G1 generates that undocumented headerless "YCbCr 420 semi-planar" variant that one must decode pixel-by-pixel at application level, and it is unclear which of the documented formats an Android phone should in the future support as a minimum? Regards On Nov 12, 8:10 pm, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bug reports have been responded to. Summary: > > Camera preview is actually YCbCr 420 semi-planar. Preview frame size > issues is a known bug. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
