Video drivers for Linux

[lethargic_man]

The other day I got myself a webcam so I could Skype. I checked beforehand that there were Linux drivers for my selected model—a Logitech QuickCam Messenger—before I bought it.

And then bought it, and found that the drivers on the Web wouldn't compile, due to changes in the Linux kernel. Bah, humbug!

After an evening and a half, I managed to part fix it myself, part follow patches Out There, to get it to compile. The installation process then tried to test it out, and threw a kernel error. After rebooting and trying again, it now complained that qcset (the part of the driver that allows setting the camera's parameters such as contrast, shutter time, etc) couldn't find the camera. I tried proceeding onwards anyway, and it ran xawtv, which was able to show video from the camera fine. But the test video button in Skype still isn't doing anything; and when I tried to Skype my father, he couldn't see video from me; and instead of video from him, I got a variety of patterns, changing every minute or two, such as this:

I can see this is going to be an uphill struggle to get it working. :-( Probably starting with reverting my changes to the driver and doing the lot again from the patches I eventually found online.

Comments

[snjstar.livejournal.com]

or just buying a webcam that works in the first place with your Linux software.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

<rolls eyes> That's what I said I tried to do in the first place!

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

When you got it working can I phone you for free on skype then? I bought some years ago a skyphone receiver but as nobody is on skype it was useless.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

You can call me using Skype now; it's only the video that's not working. The audio is fine.

Web cams

[bluepork.livejournal.com]

We had some similar minor trouble with ours when we got it and tried it on the Mac. Its fine now, but some of the advanced features like facial recognition are not usable without the (inevitably PC only) driver.

I take it you have trawled the internet for help:

http://www.linux-drivers.org/usb_webcams.html

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Drivers on a website somewhere isn't quite the same support status as drivers in the main kernel tree...

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

This thread (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=207316) seems to imply that this webcam stopped working in Fedora 10 when webcam support was added to the kernel!