Camera board available

The lack of v4l support is a bit of a deal-breaker for me - since I'm using Raspbian already, the software pain of not being able to use zbarcam, motion, linphone, etc., seems likely to outweigh any image quality advantages over a generic USB webcam. Am I wrong?

By the looks of it it's using a sub-API of OpenMAX to provide the camera support. Open* is a standardised(ish) set of APIs between CPUs and GPUs in embedded devices (notably phones), which isn't just for Linux. I don't know v4l, but I imagine someone could write a connector between OpenMAX and v4l...

Theo

The standard API for Linux is v4l not OpenWHATEVER!

Kerenel Userland API are OS-specific by definition. This is definitely not the place for cross-platform Abstraction.

Talking about phones: The only true Linux phone I know about (Nokia N900) _does_ have a v4l Interface.

There is the existing v4l loopback device. However using this will likely have a performance impact.

Sven