Multimedia Summit 2011
In Prague (Czech Republic) the Multimedia Summit was held as part of the Kernel Summit. It was good to meet the developers of the Video4Linux subsystem in the Linux kernel. VLC uses the v4l2 interfaces (and libv4l2) for capturing from WebCams and any other capturing devices supported on Linux.
In recent years the v4l2 subsystem has gotten a boost in development and specification, especially since Hans Verkuil started developing a test suite for it. By inviting multimedia applications to the summit the next step in further fostering this subsystem has been made. For us userspace application developers knowing how a kernel subsystem like v4l2 is progressing is makes a ton of difference in supporting it.
The renewed interested in the v4l2 subsystem by not only desktop multimedia applications, but also by embedded SoC/DSP vendors is a vote for confidence in the current maintainers. SoC, DSP and DVB vendors are converging in supporting v4l2 as a standard API to driver their capture, DVB-S/C/T, hardware- decoders and encoders. This is a win for not only desktop but also for the embedded world. Finally there is going to be a sane API for all multimedia related hardware and software.
I really applaud to this trend and hope it will continue for years to come.