Webcams on Linux a hit

By Andrew Miller in Reader

Posted in Linux on September 19, 2008 at 1:48 pm

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With my parents living in Italy, my phone bill is often a little on the scary side when I see it each month. That was until recently, when my parents’ tiny village in the middle of the mountains where they run a bed and breakfast finally got broadband. Using Skype has been great - free phone calls for hours on end and with much higher quality than you get over a phone. A few weeks back I thought I’d give the video aspect of Skype a go, so pulled out a Creative NX Pro webcam and put it in place. I already had Skype open, plugged in this USB camera and didn’t have to do any setup at all - I opened the options panel and it was already selected as the default webcam device. It “just worked”, as Ubuntu would make us believe is the case for everything.

My Dad on the other hand wasn’t so lucky on his Windows XP machine. He had lost the installation CD, so had to hunt around the web to get the right drivers and of course, post-installation was told he should restart his machine. A lot of this contrast is due to one man writing pretty much every webcam driver in the world for Linux. As much as I’d love to leverage on this - installing drivers for something in Linux when it’s not supported out of the box, is a mess that needs working on - usually as it requires compiling stuff yourself, which in todays age, we shouldn’t have to do. But an alarming amount of stuff is supported on Ubuntu without any work from us.

With the high audio quality of Skype and now moving Video to go with it, it completes the illusion well, and I feel closer to my parents than I have in a long time. There’s one thing sending them a picture of my cat, but there’s another thing being able to pick it up and hold it to the camera and watch my face being scratched live, accompanied with my high pitch squeal.

What hasn’t “just worked” is the sound with Skype. I’ve had terrible trouble with Skype either stealing the sound all together (meaning I get no sound when watching flash videos in FireFox), or the other way around. I’m unsure if this is Skype’s fault (I know ALSA support is fairly recent), or the use of Pulse Audio in Hardy Heron (8.04). It’s certainly frustrating! There also seems to be a bug with the sound mixer that it doesn’t properly select my microphone as the current line in. I have to load the console based “alsamixer”, deselect my microphone as the capture and then reselect it. Quite odd.

An interesting read on works with u about another man’s struggle with getting his wife to use Ubuntu. Worth a glance if you’re on your lunch break

Rated: 65% (4 votes)

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