On Sun, 17 Jul 2005, Richard Rauch wrote:

> What kinds of webcam options are there for NetBSD?  I was hoping
> that they might provide some kind of umass interface, but apparently
> that's not so, and some (most? all?) use proprietary formats.

Unfortunetaly, thats true. And there is almost no good documentation
for the cameras. Once the docs for the ov511 based cameras leaked,
thats why there is quite some software supporting this chip.

> I also saw some discussion about some specialized drivers for
> LINUX to handle webcams.  A quick look at NetBSD's USB device
> driver directory didn't look too promising, though.

Linux has it's V4L/V4L2 (Video for Linux), which handles almost
all kind of framegrabber cards and USB cameras.

Making a video framework just for USB cams doesn't make sense for
me, we can as well support devices on other busses. The problem is
to define a nice interface to applications. :-)  From time to
time there were discussions, if we could/would/should adapt V4L,
but discussions dies quite quickly. It will be a lot of work.

> What options are there?  Maybe some generic access to USB by
> packages in pkgsrc?  any recommendations?

<shameless ad>
graphics/cambevao is a standalone webcam server solution and supports
supports bktr and ov511+ based cams via ugen(4).
</shameless ad>

But there are probably more. This nice side comes to mind:
http://www2.starcat.ne.jp/~takam/bsd/NetBSD.html

-- 
Tom