This year’s edition of the Linux Media Summit happened a month ago, in Edinburgh, right after the Embedded Linux Conference. Since we were already at the ELCE, and that we’ve been more and more involved in the media community thanks to our work on the Allwinner CSI driver and more importantly the Cedrus driver, it was natural for us to attend.
The media summit is usually a meeting to discuss the hot topics, so the whole day was a mix and match of various status updates and discussions on the future needs and developments around the Video4Linux2 framework.
Most of the discussion was about how to improve the contributor’s experience and improve the maintenance. The DRM subsystem was used as an example, since the number of patches are in the same order of magnitude, and a number of v4l2 contributors are also contributing to DRM drivers. Part of the improvement of both the maintenance and contribution experience will also come through some CI work, so there was a lot of discussions on how to improve the already existing tools (such as v4l2-compliance) but also how to setup some automatic tooling to run those tests as early as possible.
A good part of the day was also spent on dealing with the current developments, such as the Request API we’ve used in the Cedrus driver, and how to integrate that API into popular multimedia frameworks like gstreamer or ffmpeg. It looks like our libva implementation was well received, so it will probably be made standard and hosted on linuxtv.org in the near future. Other developments discussed were fault tolerant v4l2, in order to deal with video pipelines where one or several components might not work anymore, and storing the v4l2 controls state in a persistent way.
It was overall a very productive day, and it’s always nice to meet people you interact with over mailing list and IRC on a regular basis. If you want more information, you can read the extensive report.
