Webcams

• 1 testing you webcam and getting important infos from the system
• 2 Supported Camera Configuration by Chipsets and Drivers
  • 2.1 spca5xx
  • 2.2 pwd and pwc (enhanced resolution) driver (2007)
  • 2.3 Webcams with ov51x chipset and accelerated jpeg video (compilation of webcam drivers - advanced tutorial)
• 3 Future

testing you webcam and getting important infos from the system

Thoroughly investigate which webcams have good Linux drivers available before purchasing a new webcam. If you already have a camera, then plug it in and get its product and vendor IDs so that you can determine which driver to use.

In order to get those important serial number that help recognise your webcam and its chipset, be sure you have the usbutils rpm installed and do:

$ /usr/sbin/lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 05a9:8519 OmniVision Technologies, Inc.

(you can see in this exemple that I have a webcam with the 05a9 8519 identification numbers.)

A good thing to do when loading a newdriver and trying to see if anything goes wrong (and getting usefull informations to give in the forums later in case of problems) is to to check the logs: open a console first and type as root, before you load and unload the drivers, or when you connect or unconnect the webcam:

su
tail -vf /var/log/syslog&

The easiest way is to install and use the programm camstream. It will detect your camera if the drivers are loaded and propose you with proper resolutions to test your webcam with.

Supported Camera Configuration by Chipsets and Drivers

spca5xx

This driver supports a large range of webcams from providers such as Creative and Logitech.

After installing the dkms-spca5xx package, you need to modify the configuration file /usr/src/spca5xx-0.57.00/dkms.conf by adding AUTOINSTALL=yes at the end, so that the driver module is loaded automatically on booting.

This page provides an excellent list of webcams supported by this driver.

pwd and pwc (enhanced resolution) driver (2007)

For a complete reference, see Stéphane Téletchéa's page on the subject

The pwd is included in the main distribution.

To get the enhanced driver, make sure you have a contrib repository in your software manager and search and install dkms-pwc with it.

The reboot or do:

rmmod pwc
modprobe pwc

working webcams with this driver list

Webcams with ov51x chipset and accelerated jpeg video (compilation of webcam drivers - advanced tutorial)

The webcams with ov51x chipset are supported by the main distribution, but some of those webcams have an accelerated jpeg feature which can't be included in the linux kernel.

You must go to the rastageeks site and download the lastest tarball of their hacked driver.

The current version is: ov51x-jpeg-0.5.4.tar.gz

You must have installed the proper source for the current kernel you are using (with the same version number).

Open a console and swith to root: su go to the directory you have the archive in and extract here then enter the newly created directory and create the drivers (make):

cd Download
tar xvf ov51x-jpeg-0.5.4.tar.gz
cd ov51x-jpeg-0.5.4
make

cp *.ko /lib/modules/2.6.17-8mdv/kernel/3rdparty/
depmod -a
modprobe ov51x
modprobe ov519_decomp

Make sure you did read the documentation of the rasta geeks site in order to load the proper modules for your webcam.

Future

A very important driver seems to be the Linux UVC driver which will be for webcam and other devices what the USB mass storage devices drivers does, which would mean transparent support with one driver for nearly all devices.

You can readm more from their page