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JEILIN STILLCAM DRIVER
Copyright Theodore Kilgore <kilgota@auburn.edu> September 4, 2007. Most recent
update is April 28, 2010.
(Everything in libgphoto2/camlibs/jeilin is LGPL-licensed, including this
README. See any of the source files for a more complete statement of the
license.)
INTRODUCTION
This driver is intended to support the cameras with the USB Vendor:Product
number 0x0979:0x0227. These cameras all have a controller chip from Jeilin
Technologies, either the JL2005B or the JL2005C or the JL2005D. Both the
control interface and the compressed data format of these cameras are
proprietary, and these cameras are supported commercially only in Windows.
In spite of some features in common, these cameras also show a very large
variation. Some of them are very rudimentary, with a maximum resolution
of 352x288, and there are also more expensive models with a maximum resolution
of 1280x1024. Some of them have viewing screens on the rear and some
do not. Some of the cameras also produce separate thumbnails, which, when
present, are downloaded as part of the raw data for the image. Accommodation
of this very wide range of features has been a special challenge in writing
this support library, especially when it seems that not all of the OEM
software available for a given supported camera will work for all the others.
Jeilin Technologies also manufactures chips which go into mass storage cameras. Those cameras, not to be confused
with these, can be accessed directly using mass storage support. The company
also makes another camera controller chip with proprietary interface, the
JL2005A. Cameras with that chip are supported in libgphoto2/camlibs/jl2005a.
If you want to read about one of those JL2005A cameras, please look in
camlibs/jl2005a, not here.
The JL2005C camera library has been included in the release versions of
libgphoto2 ever since libgphoto2-2.4.4, but it was so configured as not
to compile by default. The reason for that was that the cameras use a nasty
data compression algorithm which was very difficult to figure out. So long
as the data coming out of the camera could not be decompressed, it was not
of any use to support these cameras except for experimental purposes. This
situation has recently changed. A task force was set up to deal with the
problem, and success has been achieved. As of April 2010, it seems to be
possible reliably to get the photos out of these cameras in usable form.
For details concerning the solution of the decompression problem, please
see the file README.jl2005bcd-compression which is supposed to be included
with the documentation for libgphoto2/camlibs/jl2005c. If for any reason
you do not have this file, it can be found at <gphoto.svn.sourceforge.net>
in the directory trunk/libgphoto2/camlibs/jl2005c. My thanks to the other
members of the team who worked together to solve the longstanding problem.
Thanks to Adam Rubin and Bertrik Sikken for doing the research needed to
gather the information found at
<http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/gphoto/index.php?title=ImageEncoding
Jeilin2005CD>
And thanks to Hans de Goede for writing the decompression algorithm.
WHAT DOES THIS CAMERA LIBRARY CURRENTLY DO?
This library appears to support the basic functionality of all the various
cameras which are available for testing. It seems to perform reliably at the
tasks of initializing the camera and providing a graceful exit, downloading
the raw data, and also conversion of raw data into decompressed output files.
Cameras which support or do not support thumbnails seem to be reliably
detected, and the raw data appears to be reliably decompressed. If present,
thumbnails can also be processed into a finished form. Deletion of all photos
also is supported, by the option gphoto2 -D. In short, things appear basically
to work.
HARDWARE CONSTRAINTS:
These cameras use an extremely primitive command structure. The only thing
that the camera really does know how to do is to prepare to download all data
on it, then to download all data on it, and then to reset prior to being
disconnected. Judging by what it does, the OEM software is almost certainly
built on the assumption that the camera will be initialized, have its data
dumped exactly once, and then disconnected. Everything else is done on the
computer with the big blob of data which has been downloaded. Therefore,
any other functionality has to be based on software fakery which fools the
hardware into emulating said functionality. Suppose, for example, that there
are ten photos in the camera. Then what the camera will do is:
-- report the number of photos (ten)
-- tell how much data needs to be downloaded in all (depends on how
much room was taken up by the raw data for all the photos)
-- provide a table with one line for each photo, giving its size, start
location, output height and width, and some kind of code for the
compression method used on it.
In the next step, one must request all the image data for all the ten photos
to be downloaded. This happens in increments of 64000 bytes, with only the last
increment permitted to be "short." This does not need to be done all at once;
it is possible to download some initial block of the data and operate on
whatever photos are already obtained, keeping anything left over until the next
block is downloaded. However, ALL of the data must downloaded before the driver
program exits. One consequence of this is that the only way commands such as
gphoto2 --get-raw-data 3 or gphoto2 -p 3
can work is to download photos number 1 and 2 and throw away the data before
downloading the desired number 3 which is to be kept, then downloading any
data in the camera which comes after photo number 3, as part of the exit
routine. The sequence of downloading number 10, say, followed by number 1 is
even more complicated. The actual steps required are:
-- initialize the camera
-- download enough data to get photo number 10, throwing away all data
which is not part of photo number 10 but precedes it
-- download the data required for photo number 10
-- download the rest of the data, if any
-- send a reset sequence to the camera
-- close and reopen the camera's port
-- repeat the initialization sequence
-- download enough data to process photo number 1
-- download all the rest of the data and throw it away.
-- send the reset sequence again, and, finally, disconnect
In addition to the awkwardness caused by this kind of primitive behavior, it
puts certain requirements on any program used to handle the camera. Most
particularly, any program which uses libgphoto2 must be willing to call and
actually to use the camera_exit() function which is contained in this library.
Otherwise, given the above constraints, it is obvious that the camera would
not work properly with that frontend program.
TO DO
There are some parts of the camera command structure which are not completely
known. For example, some kind of capture function could conceivably be made
to work.
One known functionality of the camera is not completely supported, though. The
cameras all support a "continuous shooting" mode, in which the camera shoots
frames until it it is stopped by a button press or runs out of memory. The OEM
driver software saves the result as an AVI file. Here, the individual frames
are merely downloaded and saved as individual photos. The intention is to
support this feature completely, in the future.
WARRANTY?
Absolutely none. Remember, I did not sell you this software. I have written
this driver for my own edification and in the sincere hope that it might help
you to use of your camera. Please see also the warranty clauses
in the LGPL license.
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