[Newbies] Camera plugins was Re: Video Media in Squeak

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 22.04.2010, at 15:21, David Corking wrote:
> 
> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
>> There is VideoFlow which is pretty cool (scroll down to the screenshots):
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2411
>> If it's just for playback, the only cross-plattform option right now is MPEG
>> for which we have a general plugin. For Mac and Windows, the Sophie folks
>> made nice players via FFI, based on QuickTime I think. On Linux there is a
>> GStreamer plugin.
>> For camera access, there is Scratch's x-platform CameraPlugin. Etoys on
>> Linux uses a V4L plugin. For Windows there is a "DShowVideoDecoderPlugin".
> 
> I think most things that Bert mentions are open source, apart perhaps
> from the Scratch plugin.  As it is cross-platform, the Scratch
> CameraPlugin sounds great for future versions of Squeak or Etoys,
> except that it may possibly be released under the Scratch or Scratch
> source licenses, which forbid commercial use.  Anyone know if that is
> true?

Now this is a bit off-topic for the newbies list, but the Scratch folks are interested in having their plugins in the main Squeak VM, so they do not have to package and maintain them themselves for ever. E.g. for the ScratchPlugin we have a letter to that extent: 
http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-354
It has not happened yet mainly because nobody made it their top-priority to get these plugins into the VM.

It would help of course if the Scratch plugins were simply released under the MIT license, to remove all doubt.

- Bert -