Vaio Picturebook Motion Eye Camera Driver Readme
------------------------------------------------
- Copyright (C) 2001-2003 Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>
+ Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>
Copyright (C) 2001-2002 AlcĂ´ve <www.alcove.com>
Copyright (C) 2000 Andrew Tridgell <tridge@samba.org>
This driver enable the use of video4linux compatible applications with the
-Motion Eye camera. This driver requires the "Sony Vaio Programmable I/O
-Control Device" driver (which can be found in the "Character drivers"
+Motion Eye camera. This driver requires the "Sony Vaio Programmable I/O
+Control Device" driver (which can be found in the "Character drivers"
section of the kernel configuration utility) to be compiled and installed
(using its "camera=1" parameter).
The first version was connected directly on the video bus of the Neomagic
video card and is unsupported.
-The second one, made by Kawasaki Steel is fully supported by this
+The second one, made by Kawasaki Steel is fully supported by this
driver (PCI vendor/device is 0x136b/0xff01)
The third one, present in recent (more or less last year) Picturebooks
Driver options:
---------------
-Several options can be passed to the meye driver, either by adding them
-to /etc/modprobe.conf file, when the driver is compiled as a module, or
-by adding the following to the kernel command line (in your bootloader):
+Several options can be passed to the meye driver using the standard
+module argument syntax (<param>=<value> when passing the option to the
+module or meye.<param>=<value> on the kernel boot line when meye is
+statically linked into the kernel). Those options are:
- meye=gbuffers[,gbufsize[,video_nr]]
-
-where:
+ forcev4l1: force use of V4L1 API instead of V4L2
gbuffers: number of capture buffers, default is 2 (32 max)
Private API:
------------
- The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API, so
- all video4linux tools (like xawtv) should work with this driver.
+ The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API
+ (either v4l1 or v4l2), so all video4linux tools (like xawtv)
+ should work with this driver.
Besides the video4linux interface, the driver has a private interface
for accessing the Motion Eye extended parameters (camera sharpness,
MEYEIOC_STILLJCAPT
Takes a snapshot in an uncompressed or compressed jpeg format.
This ioctl blocks until the snapshot is done and returns (for
- jpeg snapshot) the size of the image. The image data is
+ jpeg snapshot) the size of the image. The image data is
available from the first mmap'ed buffer.
Look at the 'motioneye' application code for an actual example.
Bugs / Todo:
------------
- - overlay output is not supported (although the camera is capable of).
- (it should not be too hard to to it, provided we found how...)
-
- - mjpeg hardware playback doesn't work (depends on overlay...)
+ - the driver could be much cleaned up by removing the v4l1 support.
+ However, this means all v4l1-only applications will stop working.
- - rewrite the driver to use some common video4linux API for snapshot
- and mjpeg capture. Unfortunately, video4linux1 does not permit it,
- the BUZ API seems to be targeted to TV cards only. The video4linux 2
- API may be an option, if it goes into the kernel (maybe 2.5
- material ?).
+ - 'motioneye' still uses the meye private v4l1 API extensions.