portVideo is a cross-platform framework that provides uniform access to camera devices for video processing or display. It comes with a SDL demo application which compiles and runs on Win32, Linux and MacOS X systems and can address any USB, Firewire and DV camera that is supported by the host system. This application has been developed by Martin Kaltenbrunner as a part of the reacTIVision framework at the Music Technology Group in Barcelona, Spain.
The framework is in its early stages and basically has been built out of spare parts found in other open-source projects and currently provides a reasonably working software for the task. Its design is quite rudimentary and will therefore see some major improvements and changes in the future.
In general there is a simple wrapper class CameraEngine and various subclasses for each platform and camera type. The CameraTool simply returns the chosen or first available camera, initializes it with the desired width, height and color depth. Once started, a new image buffer will be returned every time you call getFrame().
On Linux there is currently support Firewire cameras and USB cameras based on Video4Linux. Firewire support is well tested, for the USB cameras we recommend a Philips ToUcam Pro (driver). There is currently no support for DV cameras. In order to compile the demo application type "make" in the "linux" folder". Make sure you have the SDL libraries and headers installed as well as the libraw1394 and libdc1394 libraries and headers.
What's New in This Release:
· improved the win32 RGB to gray conversion
· allow saving of frames (RAW and BMP)
· added a finish method to the FrameProcessor
· updated DsVideoLib now builds without DirectX SDK
· added V4L_CAMERA variable
· various minor updates and fixes
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