This project is obsolete as the Video4Linux API version 1.

See http://linuxtv.org/news.php?entry=2005-11-11-0.mchehab

pyv4l - Python bindings for Video4Linux 1

It is not that huge project. It is more the defines from video4linux headers and some helper functions.

Just have a look in the demo program in the source package.
In most cases it uses the usual ioctl function as in C. But there are some helper functions to help with the structures there.
In every submodule you have:

function pack make a tuple/list to a string suitable for ioctl
function unpack makes a tuple from the string above. (If you want edit this convert it to a list.)
names of struct members as indizes for the tuple/list
struct_format format description of the struct
struct_size length of struct (of converted string) in byte

If you need a empty "struct"-tuple just create one with unpack(struct_size*'\0').

Install

Just extract the archive and use python setup.py install (or python setup.py help for more information about valid options.)

Documentation

Some generated docu can be found here.

further development

I developed it in February 2001, because I wanted to play a little bit with the video input card. It does all what I need, so it is unlikely that I will develop it to more as you can find here.

The final update was done in November 2008.

to the project page