On Tuesday 19 August 2014 18:29:08 Ricardo Ribalda Delgado wrote:
Hello Laurent
Could you elaborate a bit on that last point ? What kind of timestamps would you need, and what are the use cases ?
Right now we only have one timestamp field on the buffer structure, it might be a good idea to leave space for some more.
My user case is a camera that is recording a conveyor belt at a very high frame rate. Instead of tracking the objects on the image with I use one or more encoders on the belt. The encoder count is read on vsync and kept it on a register(s). When an image is ready, the cpu starts the dma and read this "belt timestamps" registers.
It would be nice to have an standard way to expose this alternative timestamps or at least find out if I am the only one with this issue and/or how you have solve it :)
I have a similar use cases. UVC transmits a device clock timestamp to the host, as well as the corresponding USB SOF counter value. This can be used to translate the device clock timestamp to a host timestamp. The uvcvideo driver is currently performing that translation in the kernel, but moving it to userspace would allow more accurate host timestamp computation by using floating-point math.
In a similar fashion CSI2 cameras transmit a 16-bit frame number to the receiver. That number is currently expanded to 32-bits by the driver and passed to userspace in the v4l2_buffer sequence number. That's fine from a kernel point of view, but in userspace the sequence number is lost when using the gstreamer v4l2src element.
Have you thought about how you would like to implement those advanced timestamps ? Reusing the v4l2_buffer timecode field might be an option, but I'm not sure whether it would be the best one. Using a metadata plane also comes to mind.