The video tools
Even if using the sysfs interface to manage video devices in a more efficient manner, we can use a dedicated tool set named v4l-utils in the package by the same name, which can be installed as usual into the system if it is missing.
The main program in the package is v4l2-ctl that can be used to get a lot of information regarding a video device. Just to show the power of this command, let's try to explore all capabilities of a video device assuming we know about nothing of it. First of all, we can detect connected video devices using the --list-devices option argument as shown here:
root@bbb:~# v4l2-ctl --list-devices
USB 2.0 Camera (usb-musb-hdrc.1.auto-1):
/dev/video0
/dev/video1
Then, we have discovered that our device has been composed of two video devices mapped into the system with the /dev/video0 and /dev/video1 files. Then, we can get some information regarding the device driver we're currently using to manage this device. This can be done using...
