As you probably know I'm one of the authors of the v4l2 rewrite of the gspca usb
webcam driver framework (which supports more then 100 different cams), this v4l2
rewrite has been merged into the 2.6.27 kernel and thus will become available in
the official Linux kernel soon.

One of the parts of the v4l2 rewrite has been removing conversion from various
manufacturer cam specific video formats to more normal videoformats from the
drivers, as this really does not belong in userspace.

As a result of this the gspca subdrivers can generate raw video frames in the
following formats:

#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_SN9C10X  v4l2_fourcc('S', '9', '1', '0') /* SN9C10x
compressed bayer
#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_SPCA501  v4l2_fourcc('S', '5', '0', '1') /* YUYV per line 
#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_SPCA505  v4l2_fourcc('S', '5', '0', '5') /* YYUV per line 
#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_SPCA508  v4l2_fourcc('S', '5', '0', '8') /* YUVY per line 
#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_SPCA561  v4l2_fourcc('S', '5', '6', '1') /* compressed GBRG
bayer
#define V4L2_PIX_FMT_PAC207   v4l2_fourcc('P', '2', '0', '7') /* compressed BGGR
bayer

As we do not want to see each application implement (nor having to implement)
support for these various formats, as we like to have one code base and only one
code base for these formats. A library has been written (with me as the main
author) to convert from these formats to BGR24 or YUV420. For more on this
library see:
http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/3636.html

The attached patch adds support to the gstreamer v4l2 plugin to use this library
if available on the system, it has also been submitted upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545033

libv4l will show up in rawhide as soon as a cvsadmin gets around to creating a
cvs module for it, see libv4l'2 review request: bug 456772

Getting this patch into Fedora is important for the F-10 better webcam support
feature:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterWebcamSupport


###

A note about the patch, the patch is actually quite simple, as libv4l has been
designed for quick porting of existing apps to libv4l, for this reason libv4l
fully mimicks the raw /dev/video interface (and if no conversion is needed and
for non relevant calls like setting ctrl's, passes through all calls unmodified).

All that the patch does and all that needs to be changed to use libv4l is
replace the relevant xxx calls on /dev/video with v4l2_xxx calls.

The only special thing about the patch is that it passes the
V4L2_ENABLE_ENUM_FMT_EMULATION flag to libv4l2 on open, this patch tells libv4l2
to report the "emulated" formats in the ENUM_FMT ioctl results. Which libv4l2
does not do be default so that ENUM_FMT only reports the really supported
formats (a TRY_FMT with one of the 2 supported emulated formats can then be done
to see if conversion is supported for the specific device). Given the working of
the v4l2 plugin, enabling the ENUM_FMT emulation is needed.

I've successfully tested this patch with cheese and 2 spca561 cams (quite
popular IC, used by both logitech and creative), 2 pac207 cams (another quite
popular IC), 3 SN9C10X cams (also very popular) and 1 spca501 cam. All of which
do not work without this patch, as gstreamer does not support their proprietary
video formats (and rightfully so).

###

p.s.

While doing a local rpm testbuild of gstreamer-plugins-good with this patch, it
failed because it build a couple of plugins not in the %files list due to me
having to much foo-devel packages installed, can you please add:
"--disable-esd --disable-libcaca --disable-aalib" to the %configure flags to fix
this?