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1Vaio Picturebook Motion Eye Camera Driver Readme
2------------------------------------------------
3 Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Stelian Pop <stelian@popies.net>
4 Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Alcôve <www.alcove.com>
5 Copyright (C) 2000 Andrew Tridgell <tridge@samba.org>
6
7This driver enable the use of video4linux compatible applications with the
8Motion Eye camera. This driver requires the "Sony Vaio Programmable I/O
9Control Device" driver (which can be found in the "Character drivers"
10section of the kernel configuration utility) to be compiled and installed
11(using its "camera=1" parameter).
12
13It can do at maximum 30 fps @ 320x240 or 15 fps @ 640x480.
14
15Grabbing is supported in packed YUV colorspace only.
16
17MJPEG hardware grabbing is supported via a private API (see below).
18
19Hardware supported:
20-------------------
21
22This driver supports the 'second' version of the MotionEye camera :)
23
24The first version was connected directly on the video bus of the Neomagic
25video card and is unsupported.
26
27The second one, made by Kawasaki Steel is fully supported by this
28driver (PCI vendor/device is 0x136b/0xff01)
29
30The third one, present in recent (more or less last year) Picturebooks
31(C1M* models), is not supported. The manufacturer has given the specs
32to the developers under a NDA (which allows the develoment of a GPL
33driver however), but things are not moving very fast (see
34http://r-engine.sourceforge.net/) (PCI vendor/device is 0x10cf/0x2011).
35
36There is a forth model connected on the USB bus in TR1* Vaio laptops.
37This camera is not supported at all by the current driver, in fact
38little information if any is available for this camera
39(USB vendor/device is 0x054c/0x0107).
40
41Driver options:
42---------------
43
44Several options can be passed to the meye driver using the standard
45module argument syntax (<param>=<value> when passing the option to the
46module or meye.<param>=<value> on the kernel boot line when meye is
47statically linked into the kernel). Those options are:
48
49 forcev4l1: force use of V4L1 API instead of V4L2
50
51 gbuffers: number of capture buffers, default is 2 (32 max)
52
53 gbufsize: size of each capture buffer, default is 614400
54
55 video_nr: video device to register (0 = /dev/video0, etc)
56
57Module use:
58-----------
59
60In order to automatically load the meye module on use, you can put those lines
61in your /etc/modprobe.conf file:
62
63 alias char-major-81 videodev
64 alias char-major-81-0 meye
65 options meye gbuffers=32
66
67Usage:
68------
69
70 xawtv >= 3.49 (<http://bytesex.org/xawtv/>)
71 for display and uncompressed video capture:
72
73 xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 640x480
74 or
75 xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 320x240
76
77 motioneye (<http://popies.net/meye/>)
78 for getting ppm or jpg snapshots, mjpeg video
79
80Private API:
81------------
82
83 The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API
84 (either v4l1 or v4l2), so all video4linux tools (like xawtv)
85 should work with this driver.
86
87 Besides the video4linux interface, the driver has a private interface
88 for accessing the Motion Eye extended parameters (camera sharpness,
89 agc, video framerate), the shapshot and the MJPEG capture facilities.
90
91 This interface consists of several ioctls (prototypes and structures
92 can be found in include/linux/meye.h):
93
94 MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS
95 MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS
96 Get and set the extended parameters of the motion eye camera.
97 The user should always query the current parameters with
98 MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS, change what he likes and then issue the
99 MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS call (checking for -EINVAL). The extended
100 parameters are described by the meye_params structure.
101
102
103 MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT
104 Queue a buffer for capture (the buffers must have been
105 obtained with a VIDIOCGMBUF call and mmap'ed by the
106 application). The argument to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT is the
107 buffer number to queue (or -1 to end capture). The first
108 call to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT starts the streaming capture.
109
110 MEYEIOC_SYNC
111 Takes as an argument the buffer number you want to sync.
112 This ioctl blocks until the buffer is filled and ready
113 for the application to use. It returns the buffer size.
114
115 MEYEIOC_STILLCAPT
116 MEYEIOC_STILLJCAPT
117 Takes a snapshot in an uncompressed or compressed jpeg format.
118 This ioctl blocks until the snapshot is done and returns (for
119 jpeg snapshot) the size of the image. The image data is
120 available from the first mmap'ed buffer.
121
122 Look at the 'motioneye' application code for an actual example.
123
124Bugs / Todo:
125------------
126
127 - the driver could be much cleaned up by removing the v4l1 support.
128 However, this means all v4l1-only applications will stop working.
129
130 - 'motioneye' still uses the meye private v4l1 API extensions.