Linux Plumbers Conf 2009

I’ve been a FOSS developer for 10+ years. I started writing
kernel drivers when I got a motherboard with an unsupported
hardware monititoring IC (The Abit ųGuru).

End 2007 I wanted to do something for the greater good of Linux,
I decided to start working on webcam compatibility as many webcams
did have drivers floating around, but of mixed quality and most
where outside the mainline tree because they did decompression
of various cam specific format inside the kernel which was not
acceptable in the mainline kernel.

So I started working on getting drivers into the mainline kernel,
for which I soon joined forces with Jean-Francois Moine, who was at that time porting the usb webcam driver framework gspca to v4l2
and cleaning it up for the mainline kernel, and started rewriting existing drivers using that framework.

I’m probably best known in v4l land for libv4l, the userspace library I wrote to more or less transparently handle the decompression of many proprietary webcam video formats in userspace, fixing the decompression part of the problem.