| Kyle Swenson | 8d8f654 | 2021-03-15 11:02:55 -0600 | [diff] [blame^] | 1 | Vaio 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 | |
| 7 | This driver enable the use of video4linux compatible applications with the |
| 8 | Motion Eye camera. This driver requires the "Sony Laptop Extras" driver (which |
| 9 | can be found in the "Misc devices" section of the kernel configuration utility) |
| 10 | to be compiled and installed (using its "camera=1" parameter). |
| 11 | |
| 12 | It can do at maximum 30 fps @ 320x240 or 15 fps @ 640x480. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | Grabbing is supported in packed YUV colorspace only. |
| 15 | |
| 16 | MJPEG hardware grabbing is supported via a private API (see below). |
| 17 | |
| 18 | Hardware supported: |
| 19 | ------------------- |
| 20 | |
| 21 | This driver supports the 'second' version of the MotionEye camera :) |
| 22 | |
| 23 | The first version was connected directly on the video bus of the Neomagic |
| 24 | video card and is unsupported. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | The second one, made by Kawasaki Steel is fully supported by this |
| 27 | driver (PCI vendor/device is 0x136b/0xff01) |
| 28 | |
| 29 | The third one, present in recent (more or less last year) Picturebooks |
| 30 | (C1M* models), is not supported. The manufacturer has given the specs |
| 31 | to the developers under a NDA (which allows the development of a GPL |
| 32 | driver however), but things are not moving very fast (see |
| 33 | http://r-engine.sourceforge.net/) (PCI vendor/device is 0x10cf/0x2011). |
| 34 | |
| 35 | There is a forth model connected on the USB bus in TR1* Vaio laptops. |
| 36 | This camera is not supported at all by the current driver, in fact |
| 37 | little information if any is available for this camera |
| 38 | (USB vendor/device is 0x054c/0x0107). |
| 39 | |
| 40 | Driver options: |
| 41 | --------------- |
| 42 | |
| 43 | Several options can be passed to the meye driver using the standard |
| 44 | module argument syntax (<param>=<value> when passing the option to the |
| 45 | module or meye.<param>=<value> on the kernel boot line when meye is |
| 46 | statically linked into the kernel). Those options are: |
| 47 | |
| 48 | gbuffers: number of capture buffers, default is 2 (32 max) |
| 49 | |
| 50 | gbufsize: size of each capture buffer, default is 614400 |
| 51 | |
| 52 | video_nr: video device to register (0 = /dev/video0, etc) |
| 53 | |
| 54 | Module use: |
| 55 | ----------- |
| 56 | |
| 57 | In order to automatically load the meye module on use, you can put those lines |
| 58 | in your /etc/modprobe.d/meye.conf file: |
| 59 | |
| 60 | alias char-major-81 videodev |
| 61 | alias char-major-81-0 meye |
| 62 | options meye gbuffers=32 |
| 63 | |
| 64 | Usage: |
| 65 | ------ |
| 66 | |
| 67 | xawtv >= 3.49 (<http://bytesex.org/xawtv/>) |
| 68 | for display and uncompressed video capture: |
| 69 | |
| 70 | xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 640x480 |
| 71 | or |
| 72 | xawtv -c /dev/video0 -geometry 320x240 |
| 73 | |
| 74 | motioneye (<http://popies.net/meye/>) |
| 75 | for getting ppm or jpg snapshots, mjpeg video |
| 76 | |
| 77 | Private API: |
| 78 | ------------ |
| 79 | |
| 80 | The driver supports frame grabbing with the video4linux API, |
| 81 | so all video4linux tools (like xawtv) should work with this driver. |
| 82 | |
| 83 | Besides the video4linux interface, the driver has a private interface |
| 84 | for accessing the Motion Eye extended parameters (camera sharpness, |
| 85 | agc, video framerate), the shapshot and the MJPEG capture facilities. |
| 86 | |
| 87 | This interface consists of several ioctls (prototypes and structures |
| 88 | can be found in include/linux/meye.h): |
| 89 | |
| 90 | MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS |
| 91 | MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS |
| 92 | Get and set the extended parameters of the motion eye camera. |
| 93 | The user should always query the current parameters with |
| 94 | MEYEIOC_G_PARAMS, change what he likes and then issue the |
| 95 | MEYEIOC_S_PARAMS call (checking for -EINVAL). The extended |
| 96 | parameters are described by the meye_params structure. |
| 97 | |
| 98 | |
| 99 | MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT |
| 100 | Queue a buffer for capture (the buffers must have been |
| 101 | obtained with a VIDIOCGMBUF call and mmap'ed by the |
| 102 | application). The argument to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT is the |
| 103 | buffer number to queue (or -1 to end capture). The first |
| 104 | call to MEYEIOC_QBUF_CAPT starts the streaming capture. |
| 105 | |
| 106 | MEYEIOC_SYNC |
| 107 | Takes as an argument the buffer number you want to sync. |
| 108 | This ioctl blocks until the buffer is filled and ready |
| 109 | for the application to use. It returns the buffer size. |
| 110 | |
| 111 | MEYEIOC_STILLCAPT |
| 112 | MEYEIOC_STILLJCAPT |
| 113 | Takes a snapshot in an uncompressed or compressed jpeg format. |
| 114 | This ioctl blocks until the snapshot is done and returns (for |
| 115 | jpeg snapshot) the size of the image. The image data is |
| 116 | available from the first mmap'ed buffer. |
| 117 | |
| 118 | Look at the 'motioneye' application code for an actual example. |
| 119 | |
| 120 | Bugs / Todo: |
| 121 | ------------ |
| 122 | |
| 123 | - 'motioneye' still uses the meye private v4l1 API extensions. |