Bug#448834: wengophone: ieee1394/dv1394/firewire camcorder support

[Marius Mikučionis]

Sorry for the late reply.

2007/11/1, Ludovico Cavedon <cavedon at sssup.it>:
> Hi,
>
> Marius Mikucionis wrote:
> > Could you please add support for firewire video devices?
> > Firewire has very good video support (better than most USB webcams) in Linux.
>
> Wengophone accesses webcams via the video4linux API.
> You can use the dc1394_vloopback application from the libdc1394 library:
> http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/libdc1394/
>
> As far I could understand, it should make you firewire video stream
> accessible via v4l.

That's interesting, I was not aware of that.
I have tried and had no luck with dc1394_vloopback (it says no cameras found).
I think this probably would work for firewire *webcams* with dv1394
protocol as such, but the user should not be concerned with digging
examples of some library usage.
Anyway, I have a camcorder which is accessible through /dev/raw1394 or
/dev/video1394/0 via something called 1394AVC protocol. Moreover, it
seems that a general consensus on the internet is that camcorders do
not support dv1394, so this library does not solve the problem for
camcorders.

>
> > One way of doing it is to use libpt-plugins-avc library.
>
> I do not like the idea of adding a new dependency to wengophone. There
> is already the video4linux API which is made for accessing webcams (and
> not only, of course).

I am not insisting on this particular solution. My point was that the
(mature) code is already available and is successfully used (see
ekiga).

> I think that firewire webcams should be made accessible via the
> video4linux API, not asking every application to support both v4l
> webcams *and* firewire webcams (and bluetooth webcams, and ....)

The idea is nice, but I could not find a loopback solution for 1394AVC
to V4L, and as it is now, it would not be user-friendly enough.

> However, if you really want, I can forward this request upstream...

Yes, please.

Thanks!