1 Vaio Picturebook Motion Eye Camera Driver Readme
2 ------------------------------------------------
3 Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>
4 Copyright (C) 2001-2002 AlcĂ´ve <www.alcove.com>
5 Copyright (C) 2000 Andrew Tridgell <tridge@samba.org>
7 This driver enable the use of video4linux compatible applications with the
8 Motion Eye camera. This driver requires the "Sony Vaio Programmable I/O
9 Control Device" driver (which can be found in the "Character drivers"
10 section of the kernel configuration utility) to be compiled and installed
11 (using its "camera=1" parameter).
13 It can do at maximum 30 fps @ 320x240 or 15 fps @ 640x480.
15 Grabbing is supported in packed YUV colorspace only.
17 MJPEG hardware grabbing is supported via a private API (see below).
22 Several options can be passed to the meye driver, either by adding them
23 to /etc/modules.conf file, when the driver is compiled as a module, or
24 by adding the following to the kernel command line (in your bootloader):
26 meye=gbuffers[,gbufsize[,video_nr]]
30 gbuffers: number of capture buffers, default is 2 (32 max)
32 gbufsize: size of each capture buffer, default is 614400
34 video_nr: video device to register (0 = /dev/video0, etc)
39 In order to automatically load the meye module on use, you can put those lines
40 in your /etc/modules.conf file:
42 alias char-major-81 videodev
43 alias char-major-81-0 meye
44 options meye gbuffers=32
49 xawtv >= 3.49 (<http://bytesex.org/xawtv/>)
50 for display and uncompressed video capture:
52 xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 640x480
54 xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 320x240
56 motioneye (<http://popies.net/meye/>)
57 for getting ppm or jpg snapshots, mjpeg video
62 The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API, so
63 all video4linux tools (like xawtv) should work with this driver.
65 Besides the video4linux interface, the driver has a private interface
66 for accessing the Motion Eye extended parameters (camera sharpness,
67 agc, video framerate), the shapshot and the MJPEG capture facilities.
69 This interface consists of several ioctls (prototypes and structures
70 can be found in include/linux/meye.h):
74 Get and set the extended parameters of the motion eye camera.
75 The user should always query the current parameters with
76 MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS, change what he likes and then issue the
77 MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS call (checking for -EINVAL). The extended
78 parameters are described by the meye_params structure.
82 Queue a buffer for capture (the buffers must have been
83 obtained with a VIDIOCGMBUF call and mmap'ed by the
84 application). The argument to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT is the
85 buffer number to queue (or -1 to end capture). The first
86 call to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT starts the streaming capture.
89 Takes as an argument the buffer number you want to sync.
90 This ioctl blocks until the buffer is filled and ready
91 for the application to use. It returns the buffer size.
95 Takes a snapshot in an uncompressed or compressed jpeg format.
96 This ioctl blocks until the snapshot is done and returns (for
97 jpeg snapshot) the size of the image. The image data is
98 available from the first mmap'ed buffer.
100 Look at the 'motioneye' application code for an actual example.
105 - overlay output is not supported (although the camera is capable of).
106 (it should not be too hard to to it, provided we found how...)
108 - mjpeg hardware playback doesn't work (depends on overlay...)
110 - rewrite the driver to use some common video4linux API for snapshot
111 and mjpeg capture. Unfortunately, video4linux1 does not permit it,
112 the BUZ API seems to be targeted to TV cards only. The video4linux 2
113 API may be an option, if it goes into the kernel (maybe 2.5