At 09:35 PM 8/9/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>It does not, indeed. It had been decided that a v4l driver should only
>produce the stream in one format, preferrably closest to the native device
>format (palette). A driver must not convert palettes - this is difficult
>to do in kernel space, awkward to do without FPU, makes the driver much
>more complicated and crash-prone, and pollutes the kernel space with
>similar-but-different pieces of conversion code (in each driver).

I'm not sure I agree that this is necessarily awkward without FPU.  Every 
webcam I've seen scans images through a Bayer (or similar) pattern matrix 
of RGB filters sitting in front of a CMOS image sensor.  The hardware on 
the camera does the Bayer RGB->YUV/Planar/etc conversion.  Chances are the 
embedded microcontroller is using integer arithmetic since the silicon cost 
of an integer unit is much less than a floating point unit.  Reversing the 
process with integer arithmetic to get RGB back shouldn't be the impossible 
proposition many here seem to think it is.


>The ibmcam driver produces BGR24 - this is almost the native format in
>many IBM/Xirlink cameras.
>
>It is gnomemeeting's responsibility to take one of standard formats and
>make use of it. xawtv, for example, does exactly that.

I know from experience making my own driver work with everything that with 
several applications (such as gnomemeeting), if they call VIDIOCSPICT with 
a palette type you do not support and you do not return -EINVAL (saying, NO 
you can't have that palette) they will NOT work.  A cursory glance at the 
drivers/usb/usbvideo.c seems to indicate that apps doing this speculative 
palette request will not work with any minidriver unless the first palette 
requested happens to be the native one of the hardware.

>If gnomemeeting can be configured for BGR24, then it should work. Couple
>of years ago I wrote a patch for voxilla (openH.323 client) to accept
>BGR24, and the patch is still somewhere on http://www.linux-usb.org.

My 3comhc driver can decode to BGR24 (it defaults to RGB24), and it works 
with gnomemeeting.




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