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authorMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@s-opensource.com>2016-07-08 11:40:06 -0300
committerMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@s-opensource.com>2016-07-08 11:59:40 -0300
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treeb3b03707c6438ea9b99cc57e847ebf517f968ab1 /Documentation/media/uapi/mediactl/media-controller-intro.rst
parenta97369b5e21ea9b8b5fef7c0f4f48bbe60c07ca3 (diff)
downloadop-kernel-dev-60c2820d0f6d3497975b6488e2599f8f611d8b95.zip
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doc_rst: rename the media Sphinx suff to Documentation/media
The name of the subsystem is "media", and not "linux_tv". Also, as we plan to add other stuff there in the future, let's rename also the media uAPI book to media_uapi, to make it clearer. No functional changes. Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@s-opensource.com>
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+.. -*- coding: utf-8; mode: rst -*-
+
+.. _media-controller-intro:
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+Media devices increasingly handle multiple related functions. Many USB
+cameras include microphones, video capture hardware can also output
+video, or SoC camera interfaces also perform memory-to-memory operations
+similar to video codecs.
+
+Independent functions, even when implemented in the same hardware, can
+be modelled as separate devices. A USB camera with a microphone will be
+presented to userspace applications as V4L2 and ALSA capture devices.
+The devices' relationships (when using a webcam, end-users shouldn't
+have to manually select the associated USB microphone), while not made
+available directly to applications by the drivers, can usually be
+retrieved from sysfs.
+
+With more and more advanced SoC devices being introduced, the current
+approach will not scale. Device topologies are getting increasingly
+complex and can't always be represented by a tree structure. Hardware
+blocks are shared between different functions, creating dependencies
+between seemingly unrelated devices.
+
+Kernel abstraction APIs such as V4L2 and ALSA provide means for
+applications to access hardware parameters. As newer hardware expose an
+increasingly high number of those parameters, drivers need to guess what
+applications really require based on limited information, thereby
+implementing policies that belong to userspace.
+
+The media controller API aims at solving those problems.
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