Development: Discussion of Video4Linux API Version 3

Although probably some day analog television will became completely obsolete, the need for an analog video capture API (such as the Video4Linux API) will live on, as there will still be several practical needs for such. Consequently, we need still plan for the development of future v4l APIs.

Here are a few thoughts about development on the next generation API:

1. We should not split control over video and radio on /dev/video and /dev/radio. The main problem with it is in simultaneous work of multiple video/radio programs - actually we have single device and control over it should be collected in one place.
2. Userspace program should be able to select cards and tuners and so on, no need to keep cards database in kernel.
3. We probably need to provide some official user-space library with more intellectual and more natural programming interface (probably with the ability to support several operation systems)....a present discussion of such can be found here.

Everyone is welcome to add comments and extend this list.