Timothy Payne wrote: >I'm running FC7 and just checking to see if anyone had good luck with >one. I don't want to spend hours on it, make a post and get "OMG throw >it out!" In the past few weeks I did some reading (actually a LOT of reading!) and eventually bought a Phillips SPC900NC webcam. The reason for this is that I wanted a camera that would be essentially plug and play. Since there is the pwc module built in to the kernel I decided to try this camera and indeed as soon as I plugged it in whilst doing "tail -f /var/log/messages" the camera was immediately recognised and the module loaded. In order to test this for video chatting I initially used Ekiga in KDE, and after having registered for an ekiga account the application worked straight away from my home system, and used the default STUN server, with the V4L selected. I have made a video chat connection to a second user with this system, and apart from a few tweaks to the parameters in Ekiga it works well. Flushed with success I tried the same software and hardware at work - and hit the problem of the work firewall preventing Ekiga from working, and the STUN server does not work there! So I switched tack, and tried Wengophone - untarred the tarball, registered with wengo and it works! So these are two applications that will provide a working video conferencing system under F7 with no hassle in compiling drivers and it is as close as could be to plug n play. I would be very interested to hear from other users who have got any other pwc cameras to work without the need to fiddle about with getting drivers? I know Wengo is still in development, but it does get through the firewall without having to change anything. Ekiga does not have a SIP proxy server available (unless someone knows better!) so if the STUN server does not work then it seems Ekiga is a bit stuck unless you have access to doing NAT translation at the firewall. I would really like to see a discussion about these issues as video conferencing in Linux seems somewhat behind Windows in that regard - and I don't wish to use anything but Linux and Fedora in particular. Skype has been promising version 2 for linux since 2005 and nothing seems to have happened so until such a time as Skype works with video in F7 it seems that Ekiga and Wengo are the two routes to usable video conferencing applications in Fedora at the moment. -- mike cohler
