Forthcoming changes for libsolid

[Will Stephenson]

On Tuesday 29 May 2007, Aaron J. Seigo said:
> On Monday 28 May 2007, Kevin Ottens wrote:
> > Le dimanche 27 mai 2007, Aaron J. Seigo a écrit :
> > > as an aside, there have been a few requests made at conferences i've
> > > spoken at this year for both still and video camera detection. solid
> > > seems to have a nice interface for the former (which often can also do
> > > video too, as you note in the API docu) but i'm not sure how detection
> > > of webcams, DV sources, etc are handled?
> >
> > For now they're basically ignored. As for webcams, Will told me there was
> > an upcoming effort driven from Kopete. So it might happen in the future.

I've been talking to Cláudio Pinheiro aka Taupter who wrote the webcam code in 
Kopete about making this a libs function.

> this should cover video sources in general, not webcams only of course.
> what i'd be looking for personally is the addition of Video or DigitalVideo
> or some such to Solid::DeviceInterface::Type. even if no video cameras are
> currently even seen by Solid, it would at least point to where this support
> will be coming in.

Yes.  Taupter is a general purpose video guy - the Kopete layer can talk to 
any v4l(2) video device so I don't expect any artificial limit here.

> i see that HAL currently doesn't know anything special about video cameras,
> at least according to the spec[1] which is unfortunate.
>
> is the policy in Solid to only expose what HAL can provide?
>
> would it make any sense to have a Solid::Video object before a backend
> provides it?

The plan we discussed in Oslo (me, Matthias Kretz and Taupter) was to have 
detection in Solid but put the video I/O in Phonon.  The rough idea was to 
put v4l2 as a backend under the Phonon layer, but at the same level as e.g. 
gstreamer, since this does not support detailed video I/O for reading and 
controlling video devices.  

This would obviously not have made 4.0 and I don't think anything has happened 
on it yet.

Will