[vlc-devel] Video4Linux spat

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

   Hello,

On Saturday 07 April 2012, Sergio M. Ammirata, Ph.D. wrote:
> I would be happy with just one option to be able to use older kernels
> which are still supported until 2013 (ubuntu 10.04 desktop LTS for
> example).

VLC 2.0.0 does not work on Ubuntu 10.04 due to other dependencies.

> You can make it simple to the user, either he is willing to go to the
> latest kernel headers and enable all the wonderful new features or he uses
> the "old crap" which works fine for most mortals.

So you say. I definitely expect owners of rather expensive H.264 webcams to 
want VLC to support H.264 encoding, for example. Automatic power line 
frequency filtering is also potentially very useful where available.

> As a matter of fact, I would be even happy with having the setting default
> to the new kernel api. At least I could compile by changing a configure
> option instead of tracking down commits and reverting them.
> 
> Alternatively, if the code is so different, why don't you just create a
> new module and live the old one as v4l2_legacy?

Nobody said the code was so different. The problem is not the length of a few 
ifdefs, but a large number of (small) ifdefs. In particular a number of 
parameters (chroma, user controls) would vary, or exhibit inconsistent 
behavior.

Those will depend *not* on the version of the running kernel, but on the 
version of the kernel headers that VLC was compiled against. This is going to 
be a support disaster. To add pain to injury, the relevant version numbers are 
not even visible anymore.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.info