Question about webcams

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Bart Silverstrim wrote:

> Can people on the list recommend some things to look for in webcams  
> for using under Ubuntu to make sure they're compatible?  What are  
> some good applications for using with the webcams (for video chat and  
> for just recording input from the cam)?

The "standard" driver for Linux is the spca5xx family kernel modules,
so anything listed in the compatibility charts reachable from this page
should "just work" once the modules are installed...

http://mxhaard.free.fr/index.html

There's also a Philips webcam (PWC) driver project with its own
compatibility charts somewhere (I remember seeing them but couldn't
find a link to them them again just now). Not sure if PWC is actively
maintained any more or not...

http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/

> Second question...can you use more than one webcam with an Ubuntu  
> system and choose which one to view from?

I've never actually tried it personally, but it shouldn't be a problem.
Most webcams, just like almost everything on a Linux system, are
accessed via files. When you install a web cam it gets it's own entry
in /dev. Usually something like /dev/video0, /dev/video1, etc... and in
theory you should be able to have as many webcams installed as you have
USB BUS address space for the hardware itself I suppose.

You *should* even be able to actually use multiple webcams at the same
time, assuming you ran multiple softwares or multiple instances of the
same software that can be individually configured to access
different /dev/videoX devices. In fact I'd bet cash money that if you
look around Google a bit you'll come up with a single piece of software
that can access multiple webcams natively. Chances are it will have
"security system" somewhere in its description. ;-)

-- 
     _?_      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)--OOo------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]---
                    http://wrench.homelinux.net/~jeff/

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