What is a webcam sending down the wire?

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.webcam (More info?)

Hi people,
maybe someone knows the camera's internal logic? I have done
some tracing of the USB dialog, I can recgnize commands to
initialize a device then switch it to streaming mode, I can't
figure out how the camera and its driver are interacting to
capture a whole frame. The USB dialog shows the driver has 32
buffers each 1024 bytes which seem to fill in an odd rhythm,
until after a few seconds my viewer will show a complete
frame. I suspect the driver is making up the display from
bits of several frames as they zip through. Anyone know for
sure??
Vic.