Re: RFC: gtk v4l2 (webcam) control panel app + applet
Hi, On 01/12/2010 02:30 PM, Fabian Deutsch wrote: Hello, Am Dienstag, den 12.01.2010, 12:39 +0100 schrieb Hans de Goede: For Fedora-14 (to be released November 2010) it would be nice to have a gtk application for controlling various camera settings (brightness, contrast, etc.) *and* a small applet which shows a webcam icon next to the clock when a webcam is present. Very nice idea, also providing it as a capplet seems to make sense. There already is an existing graphical v4l2 control panel application (v4l2ucp), which can be used to model the gtk application after. This application is not suitable as it is using the QT GUI toolkit, which does not integrate well into the default Fedora desktop. Looking at v4l2ucp it does not seem to be that hard. So might this be a potential GSOC project? If I don't get any students from the local University to work on this, yes it could be turned into a GSCO project. Btw.: ekiga (http://www.ekiga.org) is also tinkering around with v4l to adjust brightness and stuff. Once this is in place, webcam using apps really should stop doing this theirselves, esp. as they get it completely wrong. Ekiga iirc just assumes there will be a contrast, brightness, whiteness and saturation control, without checking what the cam actually has. Once could argue ekiga should be fixed, but the real answer is these apps should stop handling this themselves. Regards, Hans -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: RFC: gtk v4l2 (webcam) control panel app + applet
On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:14 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote: Hi, On 01/12/2010 01:13 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote: Good idea, apart from: On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 12:39 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote: For Fedora-14 (to be released November 2010) it would be nice to have a gtk application for controlling various camera settings (brightness, contrast, etc.) *and* a small applet which shows a webcam icon next to the clock when a webcam is present. Having an applet showing up for each and every type of device that's plugged into your computer is a bad idea. I agree, but I have a number of reasons for thinking this way (note this is not me saying but I'm going to go this way anyways, this is me asking for better ways to achieve the below aims): 1. Many people don't know which app to use to test their webcam, one of the things I would also like to add to the icon is launch webcam viewer (this is a bit of a lame reason, if this were the only one, the icon could die right away). A webcam preference would probably be good enough. 2. One some laptops the webcam can be turned on / off with Fn + F##, and there is no indicator whether it is on or off, the icon would serve as such an indicator. You'd add a visual cue to gnome-settings-daemon, this is already what we do for a number of the multimedia keys. Feel free to file an upstream bug with some details about that key combination (whether it's hard wired, whether there's X key events happening when you do that and what it is, etc.). 3. Some really cheap still cameras, so called dual mode cams, can also functions as a webcam, but only when the gvfs gphoto2 share in nautilus is not mounted, this icon is supposed to tell people that: 1) A webcam was detected (even if the kernel driver at that moment was detached by gvfsd-gphoto2) and: 2) Give them easy access to unmounting the gphoto2 share, making the camera available to other apps. This is really a work-around for bugs in the way our framework works. Something like that would probably do: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606058 So making the list myself I guess that for 2. we could make the icon optional, defaulting to off (to be configurable from the capplet) and for 3. we could opt to only show the icon be default for these types of cameras. Note 3 is a hard problem, because of the mix of userspace and kernelspace drivers for the 2 functions and them both using the same usb interface on the device (these devices usually only have one interface). Having a well-made capplet (a dialogue for the control-center) would be a better fit. It should obviously handle hotplugging. Ack, that is a good idea. Cheers -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: RFC: gtk v4l2 (webcam) control panel app + applet
On Tuesday 12 January 2010 12:39:52 Hans de Goede wrote: Hi, As you most likely know I've been steadily working on improving webcam support under Fedora. As you also might know I used to work at a Dutch University teaching Computer Science. I recently got a request from them if there were any software engineering assignments I could come up with. Which remembered me that it would be nice to have a gtk app for controlling webcam settings like brightness, contrast, etc. This has resulted in me writing the attached assignment, since this is now still in the planning phase (there might even not be any students interested), this is a good moment to provide feedback on this. So please read it, and if you have any suggestions for better handling of v4l2 controls, please let me know. Hi Hans, nice idea, I was thinking about same app some time ago (about time I gave you that crap camera at FUDCon in Brno as it was only semi-usable after brightness corrections). It would be nice to expose Dbus interface and thus let it desktop agnostic for example with proposed default Gnome UI but it allows for example Qt based UI (which for example we prefer in Fedora KDE). And why I'm writing this? It would be nice to incorporate it to our (hopefully soon) proposed Dbus Fedora system configuration interface as it would be more higher level than classical API. Jaroslav Thanks, Hans -- Jaroslav Řezník jrez...@redhat.com Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno Office: +420 532 294 275 Mobile: +420 731 455 332 Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/ -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: RFC: gtk v4l2 (webcam) control panel app + applet
Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 12:39, Hans de Goede a écrit : Which remembered me that it would be nice to have a gtk app for controlling webcam settings like brightness, contrast, etc. It would be nice if it also handled non-webcam video sources (video acquisition cards). Needed settings are a bit different : switch source (tuner channel...) set aspect (4/3, 16/9, etc) People tend to thing v4l = webcams but webcams are just one v4l hardware -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: RFC: gtk v4l2 (webcam) control panel app + applet
Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 14:25, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit : Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 12:39, Hans de Goede a écrit : Which remembered me that it would be nice to have a gtk app for controlling webcam settings like brightness, contrast, etc. It would be nice if it also handled non-webcam video sources (video acquisition cards). Needed settings are a bit different : switch source (tuner channel...) set aspect (4/3, 16/9, etc) People tend to thing v4l = webcams but webcams are just one v4l hardware Also how will it interact with the new gnome colorimetry applet ? -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
