Hans Peter Selasky has been very busy adding support for web cams and other usb video devices. We tried a number of different cameras that we had laying around iX Systems the other day. All of them were recognized as valid video cameras. Some of them worked with pwcview and skype. Some of them had problems with the palettes, or would only work with some resolutions.
I was able to make a Skype call on my FreeBSD to another developer. Unfortunately, the distfile necessary for this isn't freely available. You have to download it from Skype. And it is no longer available from Skype. I got lucky and down loaded it a while ago, thinking I'd play with skype.
If you haven't had a chance to check it out, install the multimedia/webcamd. There's lots of devices that it works with.
Now, the interesting part. Hans Peter Selasky has implemented a user land driver for all of this. He implements a device driver in two parts. One piece in the kernel, which setups the shims to talk to webcamd, and the actual driver in webcamd. He uses the Linux drivers in webcamd. This separates the GPL drivers from Linux from the BSD kernel. So there's no issues with licenses. This is the same technique that's done in the Linux world to implement proprietary drivers and keep them separate from the Linux kernel. This opens the door for a wide array of devices. It is useful to think of this as something similar what Bill Paul did with NDIS and Windows drivers (except in two different address spaces rather than one).
1 comment:
I'd love to know how you did it. I have webcamd running on my system, and can view the camera's viewspace using pwcview. But I haven't figured out how to get it to work with Skype. If you could share your technique, I would be grateful!
saige_losli@hotmail.com
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