February 18, 2008
12:10
This failure has highlighted the fact that getting webcams to work under GNOME can be pretty hit and miss at times. This is especially painful for the likes of Bryen, as being deaf video is an essential means of communication (or soon will be). Together we have now mad a Holy Grail out of webcams, and we will strive to venture forward and make webcams as easy on openSUSE as they are on other OSes. Be warned though it could well turn into a quest similar to Monty Python's, I just hope we don't meet the dreaded beast.
One issue is that there are multiple drivers for multiple webcams and both of us are using different ones, this can also be an advantage as it means we can speed up testing. I am using a VGP-VCC2 which uses the Ricoh r5u870 driver, and Bryen is using a Logitech 9000 which uses the UVC driver. As we are using GStreamer library there is one other issue - GStreamer has a known bug which hampers v4l2. This should be fixed with a new release of gst-plugins-good any time now to resolve the issue.
One app that Bryen mentioned and I thought would be fun to try is Yahoo!Live, no it isn't a spoof of a Yahoo! and Microsoft marriage but a way for people to easily stream videao from their webcam. One problem with this service is that it uses Flash, and neither of us seem to be able to get our webcams to work with it
For example see the shots below, the
first one is from 10.3 and the second is from WinXP:
Where's the feed gone?
I see you 20/20
My webcam works a treat with Cheese 0.2.4 (yes the old version) and also with the GStreamer properties "Test" function, so I know it works. Bryen is able to use Ekiga no problems at all with his camera but gets a similar result from Y! Live.
I'm hoping FOSDEM will be able to enlighten me into the ways of Webcams, but in the meantime if anyone has more info then please shout out loudly - either here, by mail or on #opensuse-gnome
