From the Camera Sensor to the User, the Journey of a Video Frame - Maxime Chevallier, Bootlin

Video cameras are ubiquitous devices nowadays, taking a wild range of forms, from tiny sensors in your smartphone to complex cameras requiring lots of analog circuitry and internal decoding. The V4L2 susbsystem handles all of these devices, with an architecture capable of representing complex interconnections of components : Sensors, encoders, decoders, controllers, and so on. In this talk, we'll see how all of these components are chained together, using examples from real-life devices, by following the path of a frame, from the sensor up to the final consumer of the frame, which can be a display, a file on a storage, or a network stream. We'll see the various physical protocols and standards used for video transmission typically found on embedded systems, how they are implemented in the kernel and how to interact with them as a driver developer or a simple user. We'll also follow the transformations that a frame can go through so that it can in the end be correctly processed by the consumer. This talk's main audience are people who want to discover the various technologies around video capture, and that want an introduction to the complex but fascinating world of Video4Linux.