[PD] Using ov519 webcams (Eyetoy) with pdp/Gem (jpeg frames)

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Sat Dec 18 14:30:17 CET 2004


Hi,

I took the plunge and tried to use an Eyetoy webcam with pdp or Gem on
Linux. This is a quite cheap webcam with microphone using a ov519
chipset.

The camera is supported on Linux by the experimental ov51x-driver from
http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/download.html#ov51x which makes it
available as a v4l-device. It can be opened just fine in both
pix_video an pdp_v4l, however the picture coming from the device is
not correctly decoded. 

The ov519 chip *only* supports standard jpeg-compression and it
*always* outputs frames in jpeg-format. I have no idea, what format
Gem or pdp normally expect, but from the small bar of noise I get in
the top area of the capture screen I guess, it's definitely not jpeg. ;)

The driver packags comes with lots of documentation (but partly in
german) which also contains this quote

 - For OV519 cameras: Standard JPEG Compression is used. You need an
   application that supports this. Only the included test/getjpeg
   program does so far as I know.

The getjpeg.c code to my eyes looks quite simple (at least it's very,
very short), but I really don't understand all the v4l stuff yet and
especially not, how this could fit into the architectures of Gem or
pdp. 

Would someone with more understanding of this than I like to have a
look into this? I'm willing to compile and test a lot. ;)

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__




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