[ Thanks to S.Ramaswamy for this link.
]
“Over the past year, I’ve watched my friends graduate from
multi-player xblast to netquake on Linux. In short, the hacker’s OS
has started rocking. So you?ve racy 3D graphics, good sound, and
the works. But is something missing? What about some video
capturing at home? Uh oh! Does Linux do that? If you’ve a popular
frame grabber card, then yes, Video4Linux is here to your
rescue.“
“Although Video4Linux(v4l) is a comparatively new addition to
the Linux kernel, video, TV, and video capture support has been
around on Linux for a while, but mostly restricted to the geek
world. The bttv project…provided drivers for the popular
BrookTree chipset (hence the name BrookTree TV) as early as 1997,
and was available as a kernel patch for 2.0.x kernels. Alan Cox
introduced the Video4Linux design to provide an API for handling
video in 2.1 revision, and with the advent of kernel 2.2, v4l
became the standard. Bttv and other drivers then became part of the
v4l project.”