Sunnz wrote:
2008/3/23, Girish Venkatachalam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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On 22:59:31 Mar 23, Sunnz wrote:
> Well well, I am basically interested to set up a home monitoring
> system with a PC, OpenBSD, and a Webcam... PC and OpenBSD I had it
> going, but what about the webcam? Are there much webcam support for
> it?
>
> I have plugged in my old webcam in to the USB port just to see what
> gives... it reports the ugen0 device, Vimicro Corp. PC Camera, rev
> 1.10/1.00, addr 10... if it got this far instead of being "not
> configured", does it mean it has some support for it?
>
> What should I do next?
What should you do next?
Wait for webcam support to be added. Short of that I have no other
advice.
Perhaps one of these days someone will do it.
I too want this. If it comes to it I might do it but don't count on it.
- -Girish
- --
"unix soi qui mal y pense"
UNIX to him who evil thinks
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Ah, I guess my question is, what is missing link here... like... do we
need driver for this to function? Do we need documentation to webcams
so dev can write driver for it... or is a port missing that can
actually take videos?
OpenBSD has support for cameras. There are two kinds of devices
supported at the moment. Driver
bktr(4) is ported for to OpenBSD (look at the hardware notes for i386)
and you can use FFmpeg package
to record, convert, and edit the video. OpenBSD has also a support for
USB cameras
look at http://openports.se/graphics/vid based on OV511 chipset.
Currently it is not possible to use USB
cameras to capture video stream on OpenBSD. You can just take a single
shot.
Now from your question I gather that you are interested in cheap USB
cameras and you are interested like
along the lines of Video4Linux. For something like that you need drivers.
There are two approaches to such cameras. One is userland and another
is kernel approach. You may Google and
see what is the state of art of both approaches as well as their draw
backs.
In my understanding it seems that kernel approach would be the only
approach which would lead
real usable USB cameras (for let say video conferencing or video authoring).
Given the goals and objectives of the OpenBSD project as well as the
fact that USB devices are real mess I
seriously doubt that OpenBSD will ever get support for USB cameras.
Moreover it is also hard to justify time
spend in hacking those things if there is relatively inexpensive
hardware solution (video input devices supported by
bktr can be bought for about $150 now vs a good USB camera is probably
at least $50).
In my understanding there USB cameras are extremely poorly documented
so adding the kernel support would be
very, very difficult. It would also unnecessary complicate the kernel.
Having a drivers is one thing. Getting applications to recognize that
you have USB camera and making them usable
in application is another thing. A good example is FreeBSD which has
spcaview driver ported (essentially the part of
video4linux) and also another driver for the Phillips chip-set based
cameras. Only the second are really
usable (let say in Ekiga or MPlayer).
Some people who use FreeBSD are trying to develop utility similar to
ndis which will enable you to use Linux drivers
not only for USB cameras but for other USB devices (project Evil or
something like that).
Again, giving the objectives, goals, and standards of OpenBSD project
above is no-no in OpenBSD world.
I hope somebody who knows more about this issue put the end to this
pointless discussion.
Best,
Predrag
