Hi,

On 01/12/2010 02:25 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>
>
> Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 12:39, Hans de Goede a écrit :
>
>> Which remembered me that it would be nice to have a gtk app for
>> controlling webcam settings like brightness, contrast, etc.
>
> It would be nice if it also handled non-webcam video sources (video
> acquisition cards). Needed settings are a bit different : switch source (tuner
> channel...) set aspect (4/3, 16/9, etc)
>
> People tend to thing v4l = webcams but webcams are just one v4l hardware
>

I know , note though that tv cards also have v4l2 controls, the things
you are talking about are not controls though, there are separate ioctls
for them. And doing things like tuning to a specific channel really is
something the app should take care of. This is intended as a soundcard mixer
like application. and yes I'm aware of all the issues with sound card mixers
and their gazillion settings. But in this case it is a bit different:

For uvc cams there is a well defined and limited set of controls.

For proprietary cams, we usually have direct access to sensor registers
and could go completely crazy with the amount of controls, the trick here
is to hold back with controls at the driver level, not to dumb driver
export controls down, like we are doing in the soundcard case.

Regards,

Hans
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On 01/12/2010 02:26 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>
>
> Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 14:25, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :
>>
>> Le Mar 12 janvier 2010 12:39, Hans de Goede a écrit :
>>
>>> Which remembered me that it would be nice to have a gtk app for
>>> controlling webcam settings like brightness, contrast, etc.
>>
>> It would be nice if it also handled non-webcam video sources (video
>> acquisition cards). Needed settings are a bit different : switch source (tuner
>> channel...) set aspect (4/3, 16/9, etc)
>>
>> People tend to thing v4l = webcams but webcams are just one v4l hardware
>
> Also how will it interact with the new gnome colorimetry applet ?
>

I'm not aware of that applet, do you have a link with more info about it ?

Regards,

Hans
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Hi,

On 01/12/2010 02:30 PM, Fabian Deutsch wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Am Dienstag, den 12.01.2010, 12:39 +0100 schrieb Hans de Goede:
>> For Fedora-14 (to be released November 2010) it would be nice to have
>> a
>> gtk application for controlling various camera settings (brightness,
>> contrast, etc.) *and* a small applet which shows a webcam icon
>> next to the clock when a webcam is present.
>
> Very nice idea, also providing it as a capplet seems to make sense.
>
>> There already is an existing graphical v4l2 control panel application
>> (v4l2ucp), which can be used to model the gtk application after. This
>> application is not suitable as it is using the QT GUI toolkit, which
>> does not integrate well into the default Fedora desktop.
>
> Looking at v4l2ucp it does not seem to be that hard.
> So might this be a potential GSOC project?

If I don't get any students from the local University to work on this,
yes it could be turned into a GSCO project.

> Btw.: ekiga (http://www.ekiga.org) is also tinkering around with v4l to
> adjust brightness and stuff.

Once this is in place, webcam using apps really should stop doing this
theirselves, esp. as they get it completely wrong. Ekiga iirc just
assumes there will be a contrast, brightness, whiteness and saturation
control, without checking what the cam actually has.

Once could argue ekiga should be fixed, but the real answer is these apps
should stop handling this themselves.

Regards,

Hans
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On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:14 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 01/12/2010 01:13 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Good idea, apart from:
> >
> > On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 12:39 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> >>
> >> For Fedora-14 (to be released November 2010) it would be nice to have
> >> a
> >> gtk application for controlling various camera settings (brightness,
> >> contrast, etc.) *and* a small applet which shows a webcam icon
> >> next to the clock when a webcam is present.
> >
> > Having an applet showing up for each and every type of device that's
> > plugged into your computer is a bad idea.
> >
>
> I agree, but I have a number of reasons for thinking this way (note this
> is not me saying but I'm going to go this way anyways, this is me asking
> for better ways to achieve the below aims):
>
> 1. Many people don't know which app to use to test their webcam, one of
> the things I would also like to add to the icon is "launch webcam viewer"
> (this is a bit of a lame reason, if this were the only one, the icon could
> die right away).

A "webcam" preference would probably be good enough.

> 2. One some laptops the webcam can be turned on / off with Fn + F##, and
> there is no indicator whether it is on or off, the icon would serve as
> such an indicator.

You'd add a visual cue to gnome-settings-daemon, this is already what we
do for a number of the multimedia keys. Feel free to file an upstream
bug with some details about that key combination (whether it's hard
wired, whether there's X key events happening when you do that and what
it is, etc.).

> 3. Some really cheap still cameras, so called dual mode cams, can also
> functions as a webcam, but only when the gvfs gphoto2 share in nautilus
> is not mounted, this icon is supposed to tell people that:
> 1) A webcam was detected (even if the kernel driver at that moment was detached
> by gvfsd-gphoto2)
> and:
> 2) Give them easy access to unmounting the gphoto2 share, making the camera
> available to other apps.

This is really a work-around for bugs in the way our framework works.
Something like that would probably do:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606058

> So making the list myself I guess that for 2. we could make the icon optional,
> defaulting to off (to be configurable from the capplet) and for 3. we could
> opt to only show the icon be default for these types of cameras.
>
> Note 3 is a hard problem, because of the mix of userspace and kernelspace
> drivers for the 2 functions and them both using the same usb interface
> on the device (these devices usually only have one interface).
>
> > Having a well-made capplet (a dialogue for the control-center) would be
> > a better fit. It should obviously handle hotplugging.
>
> Ack, that is a good idea.

Cheers

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Hi,

On 01/15/2010 11:33 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:14 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 01/12/2010 01:13 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
>>> Good idea, apart from:
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 12:39 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>>>>
>>>> For Fedora-14 (to be released November 2010) it would be nice to have
>>>> a
>>>> gtk application for controlling various camera settings (brightness,
>>>> contrast, etc.) *and* a small applet which shows a webcam icon
>>>> next to the clock when a webcam is present.
>>>
>>> Having an applet showing up for each and every type of device that's
>>> plugged into your computer is a bad idea.
>>>
>>
>> I agree, but I have a number of reasons for thinking this way (note this
>> is not me saying but I'm going to go this way anyways, this is me asking
>> for better ways to achieve the below aims):
>>
>> 1. Many people don't know which app to use to test their webcam, one of
>> the things I would also like to add to the icon is "launch webcam viewer"
>> (this is a bit of a lame reason, if this were the only one, the icon could
>> die right away).
>
> A "webcam" preference would probably be good enough.
>

True.

>> 2. One some laptops the webcam can be turned on / off with Fn + F##, and
>> there is no indicator whether it is on or off, the icon would serve as
>> such an indicator.
>
> You'd add a visual cue to gnome-settings-daemon, this is already what we
> do for a number of the multimedia keys. Feel free to file an upstream
> bug with some details about that key combination (whether it's hard
> wired, whether there's X key events happening when you do that and what
> it is, etc.).
>

Good idea, bug filed:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607064

>> 3. Some really cheap still cameras, so called dual mode cams, can also
>> functions as a webcam, but only when the gvfs gphoto2 share in nautilus
>> is not mounted, this icon is supposed to tell people that:
>> 1) A webcam was detected (even if the kernel driver at that moment was detached
>> by gvfsd-gphoto2)
>> and:
>> 2) Give them easy access to unmounting the gphoto2 share, making the camera
>> available to other apps.
>
> This is really a work-around for bugs in the way our framework works.
> Something like that would probably do:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606058
>

True, but I'm afraid this solution will have issues of itself, and explictly
mounting / unmounting might be a better option.

I'm worried things like the file-open dialog might cause some io on the gvfs
share every time the dialog is used, leading to the driver being disconnected
and re-connected, which is not good when some app, say skype has it open.

Regards,

Hans
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Le Ven 15 janvier 2010 11:19, Hans de Goede a écrit :

>
> I know , note though that tv cards also have v4l2 controls, the things
> you are talking about are not controls though, there are separate ioctls
> for them.

[...]

> For uvc cams there is a well defined and limited set of controls.

Well, I'm not talking about hardware specific controls, just the generic ones
the v4l CLI tool already supports. That should be enough for many people

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Nicolas Mailhot


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Le Ven 15 janvier 2010 11:20, Hans de Goede a écrit :
> On 01/12/2010 02:26 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>> Also how will it interact with the new gnome colorimetry applet ?
>>
>
> I'm not aware of that applet, do you have a link with more info about it ?

I'm talking about the new colorimetry GUI tools Richard Hughes is writing
(maybe it's not an applet though)

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Nicolas Mailhot


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