[okay, it's been a while..]

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 ;-)
>
> 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.

Well, I've been reading stuff, and it appears that dvb cards really are a 
completely different breed of things - not in the least because they are
used for a lot more things than audio/video broadcast. I'm not entirely
sure how they'd fill in. 

Regarding v4l2, I haven't completely read the documentation yet. It's 
rather lengthy, and there are some rather obscure aspects of it (like not 
having predefined major- and minor device numbers), but it doesn't look that
bad at all. At least it doesn't have the insanity of v4l..