I have a capture card that captures SDI video with embedded audio. I have source code for a Linux driver, which I am trying to enhance to add video4linux2 support. My changes are based on the vivi example.
The problem I’ve come up against is that all the example I can find deal with only video or only audio. Even on the client side, everything seems to assume v4l is just video, like ffmpeg’s libavdevice.
Do I need to have my driver create two separate devices, a v4l2 device and an alsa device? It seems like this makes the job of keeping audio and video in sync much more difficult.
I would prefer some way for each buffer passed between the driver and the app (through v4l2’s mmap interface) contain a frame, plus some audio that matches up (with respect to time) with that frame.
Or perhaps have each buffer contain a flag indicating if it is a video frame, or a chunk of audio. Then the time stamps on the buffers could be used to sync things up.
But I don’t see a way to do this with the V4L2 API spec, nor do I see any examples of v4l2-enabled apps (gstreamer, ffmpeg, transcode, etc) reading both audio and video from a single device.
Generally, the audio capture part of a device shows up as a separate device. It’s usually a different physical device (posibly sharing a card), which makes sense. I’m not sure how much help that is, but it’s how all of the software I’m familiar with works…