Well, here are my latest findings. I just spent 2 days trying to hack the dvgrab app (available from Kino, talks to devices via userland) and somehow merge it with Gem. I am pleased to report that the hackathon was successful but the results were surprisingly the same as before (talk about the DOH! moment). However, I did discover that actually both before and now the video feed *was* working. It is however as if the entire texture in Gem is covering either really small area (i.e. one pixel) or had some kind of mangled data that remained for the most part black. How do I know this? When I flickered with my hand in front of the camera and/or made drastic changes in lighting/exposure, there was slight change in color of the overall texture.
So what gives? It obviously is not the way Gem tries to open devices as this other userland model had no effect on the final results, but there is simply something that prevents the texture to be projected properly. Granted, I reused as much of the old code as possible but the core of the engine was going through dvgrab which in and of itself works flawlessly.
So, given that Dapper/Edgy/FC6 all suffer from this (all of whom are new distros), is it:
1) udev (unlikely since devices open ok) 2) updated fw driver which somehow messes something up (unlikely since Kino works) 3) way how Gem talks to fw devices (unlikely since it apparently works) 4) something with imageStruct or some other GL-texture related thing (unlikely since 0.90 release behaves the same) 5) something else but what?
The only obvious commonality is that all distros are new. Other than that, I have no clue whatsoever...
At this point I am also wondering if Linux Gem and more specifically dv part of it is actively maintained and if so by whom? Furthermore, I would love to hear from others who are using Gem/DV in their work in order to figure out whether this affects any other recent distro/setup.
If anyone is interested in testing this other hacked version I'll gladly post it but please note that it is built with scotch tape and chewing gum.
Naturally, I am hoping for some help in this area since I am at a loss what may be wrong...
Best wishes,
Ico