On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 23:20 +0100, Nigel Henry wrote: > On Wednesday 31 January 2007 21:35, David L wrote: > > I'd like to buy a webcam that has good support in fedora, > > preferably without any kernel patches/proprietary drivers. > > Any suggestions? > > I may as well start this off. I hadn't been bothered about a webcam, but my > local Aldi supermarket had some webcams reduced from 25€ to 5€ so I went for > one. It was a Lifetec LT9388 using the ov511 driver, and amazingly is > supported in Linux. I have no problem capturing images with this using > "Camstream", but Kopete is a bit hit and miss. You need KDE 3.5 to have the > correct Kopete version to use the webcam. I have little contact with my 2 > contacts on Kopete, so havn't been able to see if I can send webcam images. > Yoy do have a preview of the webcam image on Kopete, but have to admit that > this is unreliable. Sometimes I just see a green background with some sort of > logo on it which is a bit weird, and other times the webcam image is there, > but very dark, and nothing that I do can get it brighter. These results are > on FC5, Kubuntu, and Debian Etch. > > I also have a TV card using the bttv driver, and normally use Xawtv to watch > the TV. Xawtv will also display webcam images, but I only was able to view > them in greyscale. After a bit of Googling I found a fix. Add an option > to /etc/modprobe.conf, as below. > options ov511 force_palette=15 > > Webcams appear to have some problems. As I've said, Camstream will capture > images fine, but the problems seem to be with using the webcam, and instant > messaging. Kopete from KDE 3.5 and onwards is supposed to work, and also aMSN > is supposed to work. > > I've put some links below. > > http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/cameras.html > http://webcam.sourceforge.net/ > http://tomatlab.videontv.org/webcam/webcamlinux.html > http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/linux/webcam.html > http://www.linux.com/howtos/Webcam-HOWTO/framegrabbers.shtml > > Thats about all I can remember for now. I'm using a "Creative Webcam Live!": [root@prophead VideoStuff]# lsusb <snip> Bus 002 Device 002: ID 041e:4036 Creative Technology, Ltd Webcam Live!/Live! Pro It uses the gspca driver and seems to work well with video chats (ekiga), kopete and the lot, at least as far as my (minimal) testing goes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com - - - - What's small, yellow and very, VERY dangerous? The root canary! - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
