Linux1394 Digital Camera driver for Vic

1394 Digital Camera driver for Vic

Overview

The default video tool in the access grid is vic. Under Linux both PCI and USB based cameras and capture equipment are supported, through the Video4Linux API. More recently support for FireWire/IEEE-1394 devices has begun to emerge in the Linux kernel. However, these devices are not accessed through the Video4Linux API but through the 1394 bus directly. This requires an additional driver for vic.

Please Note:

This driver covers the FireWire/1394 Digital Camera specifiation, i.e. FireWire webcams and (possibly) digital (photography) cameras. It does not include Digital Video devices, such as camcorders/handycams. This is a different format what will require a different driver; we may consider developing this if there is sufficient interest.
This driver is currently in an alpha state. We have tested this on exactly one FireWire card and one (cheap) webcam. As such we have no idea what this driver may or may-not do to your system. Certain things are known not to work, and certain formats and codecs are not supported. The purpose of this release is primarily to enable testing on other cameras and to gauge interest in this project.

Patching and Compiling

The alpha version of the patch is available here. It is against the version of vic distributed by ANL as part of AG 2.1.1. The driver depends on libdc1394, which should be installed first.

First download and untar the version vic. Download the patch and do the following:

	bzcat <patch-file> | patch -p0

Once patched you should do 'configure' and 'make' in the common, tcl, tk and rat directories in turn.

Some problems (unrelated to this patch) may be experienced when Vic compiled with gcc3; if in doubt use gcc-2.95, which is known to work.