| Vaio Picturebook Motion Eye Camera Driver Readme | |
| ------------------------------------------------ | |
| Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net> | |
| Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Alcôve <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 Laptop Extras" driver (which | |
| can be found in the "Misc devices" section of the kernel configuration utility) | |
| to be compiled and installed (using its "camera=1" parameter). | |
| It can do at maximum 30 fps @ 320x240 or 15 fps @ 640x480. | |
| Grabbing is supported in packed YUV colorspace only. | |
| MJPEG hardware grabbing is supported via a private API (see below). | |
| Hardware supported: | |
| ------------------- | |
| This driver supports the 'second' version of the MotionEye camera :) | |
| 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 | |
| driver (PCI vendor/device is 0x136b/0xff01) | |
| The third one, present in recent (more or less last year) Picturebooks | |
| (C1M* models), is not supported. The manufacturer has given the specs | |
| to the developers under a NDA (which allows the development of a GPL | |
| driver however), but things are not moving very fast (see | |
| http://r-engine.sourceforge.net/) (PCI vendor/device is 0x10cf/0x2011). | |
| There is a forth model connected on the USB bus in TR1* Vaio laptops. | |
| This camera is not supported at all by the current driver, in fact | |
| little information if any is available for this camera | |
| (USB vendor/device is 0x054c/0x0107). | |
| Driver options: | |
| --------------- | |
| 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: | |
| gbuffers: number of capture buffers, default is 2 (32 max) | |
| gbufsize: size of each capture buffer, default is 614400 | |
| video_nr: video device to register (0 = /dev/video0, etc) | |
| Module use: | |
| ----------- | |
| In order to automatically load the meye module on use, you can put those lines | |
| in your /etc/modprobe.conf file: | |
| alias char-major-81 videodev | |
| alias char-major-81-0 meye | |
| options meye gbuffers=32 | |
| Usage: | |
| ------ | |
| xawtv >= 3.49 (<http://bytesex.org/xawtv/>) | |
| for display and uncompressed video capture: | |
| xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 640x480 | |
| or | |
| xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 320x240 | |
| motioneye (<http://popies.net/meye/>) | |
| for getting ppm or jpg snapshots, mjpeg video | |
| Private API: | |
| ------------ | |
| The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API, | |
| 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, | |
| agc, video framerate), the shapshot and the MJPEG capture facilities. | |
| This interface consists of several ioctls (prototypes and structures | |
| can be found in include/linux/meye.h): | |
| MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS | |
| MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS | |
| Get and set the extended parameters of the motion eye camera. | |
| The user should always query the current parameters with | |
| MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS, change what he likes and then issue the | |
| MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS call (checking for -EINVAL). The extended | |
| parameters are described by the meye_params structure. | |
| MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT | |
| Queue a buffer for capture (the buffers must have been | |
| obtained with a VIDIOCGMBUF call and mmap'ed by the | |
| application). The argument to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT is the | |
| buffer number to queue (or -1 to end capture). The first | |
| call to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT starts the streaming capture. | |
| MEYEIOC_SYNC | |
| Takes as an argument the buffer number you want to sync. | |
| This ioctl blocks until the buffer is filled and ready | |
| for the application to use. It returns the buffer size. | |
| MEYEIOC_STILLCAPT | |
| 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 | |
| available from the first mmap'ed buffer. | |
| Look at the 'motioneye' application code for an actual example. | |
| Bugs / Todo: | |
| ------------ | |
| - 'motioneye' still uses the meye private v4l1 API extensions. |