stoolpigeon's Journal: Webcams on Linux

I don't use Arch Linux - but I found this webcam setup article on the ArchWiki to be really helpful today. More than anything else because it introduced me to GUVCViewer which is a pretty nice piece of software. Documenation completely sucks though. If you look at their site under "Usage" it tells you to check the man page - which gives you the options for the cli interface. There is nothing I could find in the program or on their site about how to use the GUI to do anything.

Uhm?

[jawtheshark]

Mine "just works". Formerly one needed to install some libs, but now... No problem. The program I use for testing is "Cheese". If that works, the rest is worst-case a configuration to set somewhere. I know for certain that my cams (I have three logitecs, and a few integrated ones) work in Flash Websites (You know what industry I work in right?) and Skype doesn't seem to complain either.

I used to have a fun little thing on my machine to make virtual cams where you could spit out any media you wanted as

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

My camera works absolutely fine on my machine - zero effort. Cheese though struggles, especially recording video. I'd been doing some stuff with VLC but it was a bit cumbersome. GUVCViewer works really, really well once I figured out how to make it work. Which wasn't especially difficult, I just don't know why the documentation doesn't explain it. I found a few write ups on using it on blogs.

Yeah I've never had any trouble at a lower level - I was just happy to find something that made getting snap shots an

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Cheese has trouble with two things:

• It seems to need some OpenGL extensions, if your card doesn't support them, you're out of luck
• It doesn't like large resolutions. I have a 1600x1200 (or whatever, quite high-res) webcam and Cheese didn't want to do much. Setting it to a more reasonable 800x600, made it work fine. I still don't know why anyone needs such HD cameras (oh, wait, I do... ), but I don't need that high resolution at all.