Some questions about this program

What is this software for?

Zapping is a TV viewer, so displaying TV is its main goal. Nevertheless, there are a number of things that can be done to a image stream, and Zapping provides a way to do them, you just need a plug-in that fits your particular needs. If such a plug-in doesn't exist, you are encouraged to write one.

I miss feature XYZ, will it be implemented?

Probably. The sooner you ask for it, the more probabilities it will have of being included in the next release.

It doesn't work!?

It does for me ;-)
When reporting the bug check that it isn't a known one (check the file BUGS that comes with Zapping), and include as much info as possible (if there is a crash include the backtrace too). Typically the output of ./zapping -d is very useful to me.

./zapping -d 2>&1 | tee debug.log

When fullscreen the image doesn't use the whole screen.
That usually means that you are using a high resolution. Tell the X server that you want to use a smaller resolution apart from the usual one (in /etc/X11/XF86Config or maybe using Xconfigurator or a similar program, such as Sax2 under Suse).
After doing this you will be able to switch to any appropiate mode with <CTRL> + <ALT> + <KP_+/KP_->.
Fullscreen and preview modes show a very distorted image
The usual cause for this is that Zapping couldn't guess correctly the BPP the X Server is using internally. This is quite common in 24/32 bpp modes, since there's no way I'm aware of to get the real bpp. Try using the command line --bpp switch.
I have a NTSC camera connected to S-Video, but PAL is used.
This is a flaw in the V4L spec. You can workaround it by passing the standard you want to use for tunerless inputs as a command line option to Zapping. For example:
zapping -n SECAM
Note: This is just a workaround, and it will only work if you have at least one input with a tuner.
Overlay only works as root, cannot be started as user.
Probably you are being hit by a PAM bug. Upgrading to 0.72 fixed it for me, if that doesn't work you can try using the --disable-pam switch to ./configure
./configure --disable-pam
and then recompile, reinstall. Or alternatively, try running with the --no-zsfb command line flag.
In capture mode the image is completely screwed up, or it fails to start saying that pixformat is invalid... btw, i'm using a XVideo backend scaler.
Some V4L1/V4L2 drivers don't support the image format named YVU420, or this support is broken (happens with bttv 0.7.65, for example). Try with the --yuv-format=YUYV command line flag. You can tell whether a backend scaler is present because of the (usually blue) border that appears around the image when you move the window around.

How can I help?

The preferred way is with translations, patches and plugins. Drop me a line if you want to help.

Can you give a concise description of this program?

Zapping is a TV viewer for Gnome. It is also a convenient framework for getting and processing the image stream from the TV source (e.g. a Webcam connected to your V4L device, or the teletext from vtx devices).

Please direct any questions about this program to the mailing list.

If you want to contact me (but please use the mailing list instead if it isn't strictly confidential :-)), you just have to follow this link.