1.24.4. Comparison with old cropping APIΒΆ
The selection API was introduced to cope with deficiencies of the older CROP API, that was designed to control simple capture devices. Later the cropping API was adopted by video output drivers. The ioctls are used to select a part of the display were the video signal is inserted. It should be considered as an API abuse because the described operation is actually the composing. The selection API makes a clear distinction between composing and cropping operations by setting the appropriate targets.
The CROP API lacks any support for composing to and cropping from an
image inside a memory buffer. The application could configure a
capture device to fill only a part of an image by abusing V4L2
API. Cropping a smaller image from a larger one is achieved by setting
the field bytesperline
at struct v4l2_pix_format
.
Introducing an image offsets could be done by modifying field
m_userptr
at struct v4l2_buffer
before calling
VIDIOC_QBUF. Those operations should be avoided
because they are not portable (endianness), and do not work for
macroblock and Bayer formats and mmap buffers.
The selection API deals with configuration of buffer
cropping/composing in a clear, intuitive and portable way. Next, with
the selection API the concepts of the padded target and constraints
flags are introduced. Finally, struct v4l2_crop
and struct
v4l2_cropcap
have no reserved fields. Therefore there is no
way to extend their functionality. The new struct
v4l2_selection
provides a lot of place for future
extensions.
Driver developers are encouraged to implement only selection API. The former cropping API would be simulated using the new one.