Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

The FCamera application is simply a demonstration of some of the functionality that the new (open source) camera API they've written offers. Currently, it has little use for average users, but it offers the potential for all sorts of sophisticated photo/video applications. The idea also seems to be to make this API a cross-platform standard, making it easier for developers to port applications.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

The average user aspect is not a useful simplification. Here's a slightly more useful simplification - there are people who take snapshots just to document something (e.g., a birthday), and then there are people who really care about making great looking photographs, whether they are documentary or artistic or something else. If you're the latter kind of person, the FCamera apps and the FCam API just gave you a great new set of tools.

The new tools are much more powerful than what you get on phones. In some ways, they are even more powerful than what you get with high-end professional cameras, because the FCam API is available for anyone to program against (try programming the software in a top-of-the-line Nikon... you can't).

But it's even more than that, because the FCam API enables many new applications (or higher performance / better fidelity in existing applications) for the camera that don't produce "pictures" in the traditional sense. Think about all the various apps that use a camera - barcode scanners, document scanners, overlays on live video streams, etc.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Well, now that we know what the big Ovi news is, we can all ease up and enjoy fcamera as it's a million times more important/useful :)

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Even if your an "Average user" you'd still find the development of the FCam API and its programs like FCamera useful. Things like image stabilization for example, so if you have a shaky hand the effect isn't as profound.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

I have uploaded a fcam-drivers package for kernel-power
http://n900.tannerlab.com/kernel/fca....5-1_armel.deb

There is nothing special about those modules. They just need to be compiled
against the kernel-power headers.
In the future we probably need a separate fcam-drivers-package (but AFAIK HAM is not sophisticated enough to handle such dependencies and conflicts) or we would need to add modules for both kernel versions to the fcam-drivers package.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Thanks Titan!

We'd be happy to add modules compiled for the power-kernel to fcam-drivers. I had a little trouble compiling them though. Maybe I was doing something silly. Here's what I did:

In scratchbox:

- fakeroot apt-get install kernel-power-headers

- apt-get source fcam-drivers

- edit fcam-drivers Makefile to point to /usr/src/kernel-power-headers

- lots of include files are missing from /usr/src/kernel-power-headers/linux/include, so I figure perhaps kernel-power-headers is more like a patch over the base headers package

- cp -r /usr/src/kernel-headers kernel-headers-combined

- cp -r /usr/src/kernel-power-headers kernel-headers-combined

- change the fcam-drivers Makefile to point to kernel-headers-combined

- Now it compiles, but after installing kernel-power (and kernel-power-flasher, etc, etc) on the device, power-cycling it, forcibly installing the fcam-drivers package, power-cycling again, I get the usual nonsense about wrong versions in dmesg when I try to insmod the new modules. vermagic seems to match uname though according to modinfo (2.6.28.10power37), so I get confused and give up.

What am I doing wrong?

- Andrew (one of the fcam guys)

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Hi Andrew,

you're absolutely right. it's a bug that some headers are missing in kernel-power-headers
and I'm going to fix it with the next version (v38) this weekend.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Excellent app!! and by the way, using the lehto kernel you can have both working.....overclocking and Fcam at the same time.No problems here!

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

Ah ok. We'll release updated fcam-drivers as soon as we can after that.

Re: Nokia has exciting news for N900 users
 

I think I found a minor bug in Fcamera.. but I don't quite understand BugZilla, so I'll post it here in the hopes that someone will pick it up :D


I just took a picture, and it's called "photo2010.06.23_19.30.34.63"
So apparently it saves it as if it was taken on 23 June 2010, but it's July.

Could be a case of just adding "++" to the month variable, since January is always 0 in programming.

Edit: I'll look around for posting it somewhere..