The Video4Linux2 API: an introduction
[Posted October 11, 2006 by corbet]
Your editor has recently had the opportunity to write a Linux driver for a
camera device - the camera which will be packaged with the One Laptop Per
Child system, in particular. This driver works with the internal kernel
API designed for such purposes: the Video4Linux2 API. In the process of
writing this code, your editor made the shocking discovery that, in fact,
this API is not particularly well documented - though the user-space side
is, instead,
quite
well documented indeed
. In an attempt to remedy the
situation somewhat, LWN will, over the coming months, publish a series of
articles describing how to write drivers for the V4L2 interface.
V4L2 has a long history - the first gleam came into Bill Dirks's eye back
around August of 1998. Development proceeded for years, and the V4L2 API
was finally merged into the mainline in November, 2002, when
2.5.46
was released. To this
day, however, quite a few Linux drivers do not support the newer API; the
conversion process is an ongoing task. Meanwhile, the V4L2 API continues
to evolve, with some major changes being made in 2.6.18. Applications
which work with V4L2 remain relatively scarce.
V4L2 is designed to support a wide variety of devices, only some of which
are truly "video" in nature:
- The
video capture interface
grabs video data from a tuner or
camera device. For many, video capture will be the primary
application for V4L2. Since your editor's experience is strongest in
this area, this series will tend to emphasize the capture API, but
there is more to V4L2 than that.
- The
video output interface
allows applications to drive
peripherals which can provide video images - perhaps in the form of a
television signal - outside of the computer.
- A variant of the capture interface can be found in the
video
overlay interface
, whose job is to facilitate the direct display
of video data from a capture device. Video data moves directly from
the capture device to the display, without passing through the
system's CPU.
- The
VBI interfaces
provide access to data transmitted during
the video blanking interval. There are two of them, the "raw" and
"sliced" interfaces, which differ in the amount of processing of the
VBI data performed in hardware.
- The
radio interface
provides access to audio streams from AM
and FM tuner devices.
Other types of devices are possible. The V4L2 API has some stubs for
"codec" and "effect" devices, both of which perform transformations on
video data streams. Those areas have not yet been completely specified,
however, much less implemented. There are also the "teletext" and "radio
data system" interfaces currently implemented in the older V4L1 API; those
have not been moved to V4L2 and there do not appear to be any immediate
plans to do so.
Video devices differ from many others in the vast number of ways in which
they can be configured. As a result, much of a V4L2 driver implements code
which enables applications to discover a given device's capabilities and to
configure that device to operate in the desired manner. The V4L2 API
defines several dozen callbacks for the configuration of parameters like
tuner frequencies, windowing and cropping, frame rates, video compression,
image parameters (brightness, contrast, ...), video standards, video
formats, etc. Much of this series will be devoted to looking at how this
configuration process happens.
Then, there is the small task of actually performing I/O at video rates in
an efficient manner. The V4L2 API defines three different ways of moving
video data between user space and the peripheral, some of which can be on
the complex side. Separate articles will look at video I/O and the
video-buf layer which has been provided to handle common tasks.
Subsequent articles will appear every few weeks, and will be added to the
list below:
(
Log in
to post comments)