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Linux Magazine: Video4linux Drivers, Part 2: Video-capture Devices

“Last month I began to develop a very simple camera driver
as an illustration of Linux’s video-capture interface. What we need
to do now is to provide the functions to control the use of the
device and to query its facilities.
As with the radio driver,
the major control interface is via the ioctl() function (Listing
One). Video-capture devices support the same tuner calls as radio
devices, and also support additional calls to control how the video
functions are handled. In this simple example the card has no
tuners, to avoid making the code complex.”

“The first ioctl we must support (required by all video-capture
and radio devices) is VIDIOCGCAP. This behaves exactly the same as
with a radio device. This time, however, we report the extra
capabilities we outlined earlier when defining our video_dev
structure.”

“We now set the video flags saying that we support overlay,
capture, scaling, and chromakey. We also report size limits — our
smallest image is 16×16 pixels, our largest is 640×480.”

Complete
Story

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