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
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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...
I just plugged in STX: doesn't appear to be supported, but i'll play a
little.