Re: A web-cam detection library ?

[Filippo Argiolas <fargiolas gnome org>]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Nicolas Bertrand <nico inattendu org> wrote:
> Hi, I'm a dev. on luciole (https://launchpad.net/luciole), a stop-motion
> software who can use a web-cam for live image capture for animation
> movie realization.

Hi!

> So, as we did some very close work on web-cam detection. I have a
> suggestion to create a webcam detection library. It can be, I think,
> useful some other video-editing tools, like pitivi.
>
> The library goal can be to detect connected web-cams with
> dbus/udev/gudev. And as output provide a structure with all detected
> webcam and associated and also a gst Bin ( with filter on image
> resolution and framerate)
>
> The library can be written in C with other language bindings as python.
> With a GPL license. I don't know if it can be in the scope of Gnome project

I don't know if you already took a look at our sources: we did some
refactoring work in cheese recently and actually we *have* a library
for camera detection (libcheese-common, basically two classes,
CheeseCameraDeviceMonitor for gudev device retrieval and hotplugging
and CheeseCameraDevice for detecting available capabilities using
gstreamer).
It's not exported yet but we could do it if you think it fits your
needs, it just needs some cleanup, annotations, documentation and
bindings if you want to use it in python.
It would be great to share common stuff and avoid duplication as much
as possible, we also have a gtk widget that displays the video stream
coming from the camera, and that is already being used in the new
GNOME user account dialog, you might want to look at that too.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and tell us what's missing,
what you like and what you don't, what we need to improve.
Regarding the gstreamer bin creation, are you aware of camerabin?

Changing a little bit the whole point of view, have you ever thought
of working directly in Cheese to add your stop motion video features?
We already have some basic time lapse function, it would be great to
add a custom mode for stop motion video making!

Ciao,

Filippo