Comment 51 for bug 185634

Hi,

> I think that is wrong.

Yes, this is completely wrong. Things goes exactly in the reverse
orde :)

> the newer versions of uvcvideo require another
> tool to load firmware (it was being patched before).

Laurent Pinchard, linux-uvc author, never accepted the isight patch
including kernel-space firmware loader. And this is a wise decision. I
reworked the patch which goes from 20K to 7K and implement
isight-firmware-tools to properly load the firmware. The patch has been
accepted upstream.

I moved the extraction code in userspace as isight-firmware-tools. I
also splitted extraction and loading of the firmware, saving use to have
a AppleUSBVideoSupport file lost in /lib/firmwares ;). HAL is meant to
do additionnal job on device in order to get them ready to use. So ift
just do it the right way, as it has been designed for. Something nice
would have been to use generic firmware loading (see unmaintained
fxload).

Ubuntu shipped isight_usb along uvcvideo, but now, isight_usb is
redundant with uvcvideo and ift. It can even be annoying.

Something nice would be to be able to download the driver and extract
the firmware automatically. I never found where to find this driver.
Neither for Windows® nor Mac OS X (and Combo Update weight hundreds of
megabytes).

I wish this mail clarify the situation. Please tell me if we need
something like a wikipage, better launchpad project page description or
anything else.

Regards,
Étienne.
--
E Ultreïa !