> QuickCam Pro 4000 looks good, but i'm leaning towards Logitech > QuickCam Communicate STX. > It appears to be little more affordable, and carries the same > features. In particular, I believe both are mountable on a laptop. The > only thing i'm concerned about is that STX does video using avi > format. I've never heard anything about that model, seems that it can be managed by the called qc-usb driver. That model it's mentioned here (note that they talk about _experimental_ support): http://qce-ga.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~tuukkat/quickcam/quickcam.html The model I talked you about uses the pwc driver, like most of Philips' webcams, and its development comes from afar, before the appearance of this model in particular. Here you are a list of well-known models supported and non-supported by this driver: http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/PWC/WorkingWebcamsWithPWC?CGISESSID=fa15c1b6777144acc2cde41a8c931f10&CGISESSID=fa15c1b6777144acc2cde41a8c931f10 The actual development of the pwc driver can be followed from here: http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ and that's what I do from time to time, going there, obviously. Maybe you could get better,specific answers here: http://lists.saillard.org/mailman/listinfo/pwc An exhaustive list of webcam drivers and models that they cover: http://linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Webcams >From there you can find more references about webcam models, drivers developed, status, etc....for example.. http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/cameras.html --- So, after this, when purchasing you should approximately know what you are doing if you have in mind your Linux. >I'm not sure if Gnome Meeting, for instance, would be able to handle >it. What video format does QuickCam Pro 4000 use? I don't understand your question... AFAIK this gadget is a device for Linux, it takes its place in /dev/video[0,1], the specific driver pwc (or whatever...) if loaded, make it available, and then the apps that you choose (gnomemeeting for example...) access to it thanks to the video4linux (v2l2) api; what you as an end-user can do with it will depends on the quality/stage-of-development of all of them, including the chipset of the webcam. But I'm not either a programmer nor even a computing man, so sorry but my explanation will be always really poor here as you can see. For example, supposing you have this model, its driver correctly installed and loaded (pwc), and you launch an app, let's say videolan-client, into its interface you go to "file">"Open device of capture", you set this to /dev/video[0,1] and you just have accessed to the device, you can see the stream that the cam is capturing into that moment. Nothing else. What you want _to record_ this? OK, that depends on you, formats for audio and video, codecs and containers chosen, etc, etc... _you_ adjust that at your own convenience. I don't know if I've explained me clearly... Regards, Daniel
