Webcams, eye-candy and Phonon

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 17:52 +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

> > What I would suggest is seeing what these effects are and implementing
> > them from scratch.
> 
> I warned Logitech that one they release a first version of their video effects 
> for Linux someone will probably try to create a free software implementation. 
> Those are the game rules, and they accept them. However, they still would 
> like to offer their own implementation in a closed source binary.
> 
> > Otherwise, prehaps a "video processing" API is 
> > needed which allows both free and proprietary effects to be achived
> > through a standalone executable communicating through a unix pipe/etc.
> 
> Why not through a plugin API ? One of the options I thought about was to write 
> a GStreamer plugin. If Phonon is configured to use the GStreamer backend, 
> that would then be completely transparent (assuming Phonon uses GStreamer to 
> access webcams).

Hi Laurent,
Working on GStreamer I thought I should chime in on this. GStreamer would support such video
effects quite well and there already are a series of video effect plugins in GStreamer,
most of them ported from the effectv project - http://effectv.sourceforge.net/

There is/was a GStreamer based project doing motion tracking and similar, the results of which you can
see here:
http://iterative.org/echo/

GStreamer is LGPL so some of these effects/plugins being properietary shouldn't be a problem, but be aware that if
Logitech is hoping for these binaries to get bundled with distributions etc., this will probably not happen to a large extent
as you then start getting crashes with the licensing of applications and libraries under the GPL.

But I guess their wish is to offer this as a special download or bundling for Logitech customers and in that case it isn't a
problem at all, since the GPL only covers distribution.

Christian