One of the features I’m looking forward to the most in Fedora 9 isn’t even listed anywhere, but DaveJ mentioned it in his LCA talk. Namely merging a lot of the webcam drivers which are currently not upstream and getting them ready for inclusion in the upstream tree, this is a sexy feature mainly because the support we have out of the box for webcams is rather poor and these drivers will add a lot of new devices to our out of the box support (including my webcam since it’s powered by uvcvideo). The really nice bit is that this is not just a Fedora 9 feature, at least koji currently contains kernels for F8 with these patches applied so you can have it today.
My hardware working out of the box, using Free Software.. one good reason to look forward to Fedora 9
liquidat said,
19. February 2008 at 01:29
Nice to hear that since I do also have a uvcvideo cam. But do you have a link to more information?
And additionally, do you know why exactly the drivers are not upstream? I think with Fedora all big distributions are shipping uvcvideo by default.
davidnielsen said,
19. February 2008 at 12:35
I believe they are not upstream primarily because of bugs in the V4L2 spec though that message is from August 2007.
http://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/linux-uvc-devel/2007-August/001930.html
Another aspect to consider might be that authors of not just uvcvideo but also the other out of kernel webcam drivers simply like hacking for their own need and don’t feel they have the time to make their code comply to the standards required for inclusion. Another thing to consider is even when this is done for them, they’ll be facing an additional support burden as every distro now will be shipping them bugs so having some talented help to ease the process such as the Linux Driver Project would probably be a good idea.
One nice aspect of getting good webcam support into distributions is that now we might be able to see applications support this technology. E.g. uptill now only aMSN supports the MSN video and VoIP protocol extensions, with wider support for the required hardware we should see wider demand for this support in our stack. End result, hopefully an communication stack worthy of 2008.
liquidat said,
19. February 2008 at 15:45
I see – I would also like to see further development in that area, especially considering the fact that for example Telepathy (and with it Decibel in KDE) could provide a common base for all kinds of communication applications or additions.
Thanks for the answer.