The V4L2 driver provides a standard Linux driver for accessing camera features: this is the driver needed to use a Raspberry Pi camera as, for example, a webcam. The V4L2 driver provides a standard API on top of the firmware-based camera system.
Installation of the V4L2 driver is automatic. It is loaded as a child of the VCHIQ driver, and once loaded it will check how many cameras are attached and then create the right number of device nodes.
| \dev\videoX | Default Action |
|---|---|
| video10 | Decode |
| video11 | Encode |
| video12 | Simple ISP |
| video13 | Full ISP In |
| video14 | Full ISP Hi-res Out |
| video15 | Full ISP Lo-res Out |
| video16 | Full ISP statistics |
| video19 | HEVC Decode |
There are many Linux applications that use the V4L2 API. The kernel maintainers provide a test tool called Qv4l2 which can be installed from the Raspberry Pi OS repositories as follows:
sudo apt install Qv4l2
Please see the V4L2 documentation for details on using this driver.