It occurred to me that Martin Husemann wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.current:
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 08:57:45AM +0100, martijnb@atlas.ipv6.stack.nl wrote:
>> However, if every (class of) device outputs its data differently, the point
>> of having an abstract hardware interface decays rapidly - so there's a 
>> tradeoff to be made.
>
> That's like audio cards outputing different audio formats ;-)

Except that the difference in output formats aren't that big, and have settled
on a few very common formats that almost all devices support (44.1 KHz, 16
bit stereo, choose your endianess), and aren't that hard to convert.

In this case, we'd have raw, uncompressed data (in various YUV encoding),
MPEG data, and device-specific data - like the output from Philips (And
several Logitech) webcams. 

> It should still be possible to abstract some setup interface (which probably
> is ignored for webcams, not having to tune) and a "describe your output
> mode" interface, plus a few bookeping (list all optional output formats,
> what have you) ones.

Aye.