Development: Video4Linux APIs

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Development stages of the Video4Linux application programming interface (API).

Video4Linux

v4l (also known as v4l1) is the original video capture/overlay API of the Linux kernel. It appeared late in the 2.1.x development cycle of the Linux kernel. Support for the v4l API was dropped from the 2.5.x branch with the 2.6.15 kernel release, but remains in the 2.4.x branch.

Video4Linux2

v4l2, the second generation of the video4linux API, fixes a number of design bugs that were present in the original API. It was integrated into the standard Linux kernel in 2.5.x.

Starting in October 2006, Jon Corbet started publishing a series of articles to document v4l2 internals, including video_ioctl2, at lwn:

One may also wish to read through some suggestions for enhancing v4l2.

Video4Linux3