Re: video(4) landed. "No webcam driver" is dead.

On Sun, Aug 9, 2026 at 9:41 PM Abdelkader Boudih <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> For years, the go-to move for dodging a video call was "well, I run FreeBSD, and there's no webcam driver, so."
>
> Camera stays off, nobody questions it, everyone assumes a serious systems person and not someone hiding from a standup. That excuse is now retired.
> By Adrian Chadd, Baptiste Daroussin, and me.
> We did this. On purpose. I don't know what we were thinking.
>
> video(4) is a new kernel-side capture framework:
> a common device model for things that produce frames, instead of every capture driver reinventing /dev/videoN from scratch.
>
>  Initial consumers:
>
> uvideo(4): USB Video Class webcams, converted onto the new framework. Most of the hard logic here was already done for us - OpenBSD's Robert Nagy and Marcus Glocker wrote the original driver years ago, Baptiste ported it to FreeBSD.
> fwcam(4): Apple firewire camera. work perfectly for me, but Australian mode (upside down) for Adrian.
>
> Where its been tested:
>
> across basically the whole Apple fleet here : MacBooks, iMacs, Every one of those machines is now missing exactly one thing (WiFi, still catching up on some chipsets).
> Also tested on regular Laptops with integrated webcams, which mostly just worked .
>
> Diffs for the design: D58367-D58369
>
> What's coming next:
>
> PCI capture cards - the "I have a real capture card, not a webcam".
> SBC-class cameras (think Raspberry Pi camera modules) - CSI-ish targets, for anyone doing embedded/SBC work on FreeBSD
>
> I'd love it if you:
>
> Threw a UVC device at uvideo(4) that has those non generic cameras. (especially 2k, 4k, thermal cameras, ect).
> Have an firewire webcam
>
> Once a few more hackers have tested this, I will post it to freebsd-current@.
>
> As for meetings: the next generation of excuse is already in production. "Sorry, can't turn my camera on, I'm running TempleOS this week, it's between me and God." Untestable & Unfalsifiable. Nobody's going to ask follow-up questions. You're welcome.
>
> Sent from HolyC Internet Missionary.

Very nice! Would this replace webcamd that I was using for years with
my webcam and hdmi videograbber over /dev/video<N>? :-)

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info