I have one more thing going now that I can get write to block.

I'm doing the write in a separate thread with a semaphore, so that while it blocks I won't open or start video. When it goes through, I open the capture device and ship frames until the write blocks again.

I have a few race conditions to clean up, but aside from that it seems to work, so it could be run out of init as fcamd and would just sit there until flash came up and started pulling video (with the above hexedition).

When I get it working I hope to form a .deb file (and contribute this mini version back to the project - but it is stripped as Nokia tablets only have one kind of hardware, so much probing and setting was cut out).