| From: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> | now here's where i'm still unclear -- i read about the "UVC" | compatibility but, for the webcam i picked up, all i needed was to | download the "gspca" source: | | http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html >From my faulty memory: That driver is maintained by one guy. It matches one (very popular) family of chips. It is based on reverse engineering. It does not know how to use all the features of the web cam. The driver has not been included in the kernel.org trees. That makes maintenance a continuous and possibly daunting process. At times (I think) it has gone unmaintained. The author was annoyed at some kernel interface changes. I seem to remember that he has stated that he won't submit it for inclusion in the kernel tree. Ubuntu included this driver in 6.06 (might be different now). There is a mailing list here: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spca50x-devs I'm a little confused about whether there are viable forks. Here is a closed source one that is probably a Bad Thing: http://www.linux-projects.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=136 | and i'm still unclear on this "UVC" thing, but i'm willing to do some | reading on gspca versus UVC and so on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class Finally, a generic, non-proprietary interface to web cams. It looks as if Microsoft is our friend here: the article claims that MS requires this conformance for displaying Windows Vista logo. I expect this to get in the kernel tree when it is stable (pure guess).
