libfg - Frame Grabber Library

Details

Version: 0.1a

Author: Gavin Baker <gavinb@antonym.org>

License: Lesser GPL v2.1 (LGPL)

    Description:        Provides a simple high-level C interface to control
                        Video4Linux compatible hardware such as frame grabbers
                        and TV tuners.

License Terms

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA or visit their website at http://www.gnu.org/.

Introduction

This library provides a simple C interface for controlling a frame grabber or TV tuner card under Linux. It uses the Video 4 Linux API for control. It supports the following features:

Frame capture (for image processing)
Video overlay (coming soon!)
Picture control
TV tuner control

Documentation

Currently no documentation exists beyond the header files (which are extensively commented). Either planned or in progress are the following works:

The Video4Linux API and how to use it
The libfg interface and how to use it
The Python bindings

Hardware Support

Libfg should work with any V4L supported hardware, but is completely dependent upon the version of the kernel you are using. A recent 2.4 series kernel is strongly recommended.

It has been tested to work with the following configurations:

Debian woody 3.0, kernel 2.4.17, bttv driver, FlyVideo 98 card
Mandrake 8.2, kernel 2.4.19, bttv driver, Picolo card

Python Bindings

A very preliminary release of bindings to Python are now included. Methods will be gradually added over time.

Currently the extension must be manually built. Fortunately, this is only slightly harder than falling off a log. It does require that you have a recent (eg. 2.x) version of Python installed, with distutils. And of course, you must build libfg first!

% python setup.py build

This will build the module and put it in a strange directory, like build/lib.linux-i686-2.1. If you go there and run the python interpreter, you can do stuff like this:

>>> import fg
>>> g = fg.Grabber()
>>> g.set_source(0)
>>> g.set_channel(64.250) # ABC TV
>>> g.demo('test01.pgm')

Have fun!