Ages ago I’d picked up a cheap webcam at a computer fair on a whim, and eventually got around to seeing if it would install onto my ubuntu linux desktop.
The intent was to setup a cam onto the building site at the back of my house as one of those tech projects techies do. Unfortunately it’s only a partial success as the screen shot shows. The camera is from some strange manufacturer called I think “digital product” with the delightful motto “try my best to do always”. Obviously “best” didn’t quite include the English language :) It comes with a windows driver, but it’s normally not too much of a problem for linux which provides its own drivers and decides the right one by asking the attached device. So simply plugging into the usb port and ubuntu 8.10 (2.6.27-14 kernel) detected the camera fine, loading the appropriate drivers as shown in the ‘dmesg’ log:-
- [33883.148277] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
- [33883.345674] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
- [33883.602353] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
- [33883.628129] gspca: main v2.2.0 registered
- [33883.634298] gspca: probing 0ac8:301b
- [33885.268028] zc3xx: probe 2wr ov vga 0x0000
- [33885.312027] zc3xx: probe sensor -> 11
- [33885.312034] zc3xx: Find Sensor HV7131R(c)
- [33885.317199] gspca: probe ok
- [33885.317245] usbcore: registered new interface driver zc3xx
- [33885.317254] zc3xx: registered
Using the command ‘lsusb’ it is reported as:- Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0301 WebCam
Setting my computers multimedia systems selector (under the system>preferences menu) to Video for linux 2 (v4l2) v4l2src device=”/dev/video0” allowed for some video capture, but poor unusable quality. Wondering if it required a more sophisticated application downloaded and tried “Camorama” and “Cheese”.
Camorama is a more advanced program allowing control of the image but only works with v4l version one. So no image at all. Cheese is much more basic, works with v4l2, but still displayed the same naff image. So its a problem with the drivers.
A bit of internet research showed this seemed to be a common problem for these HV7131R based devices. >sigh< trust me to pick the one that won’t work. That’s ‘cheap’ for you. Sadly it all highlights the problems with linux on the desktop. Everyone provides a windows driver. Linux has to get by itself and figure stuff out frequently without much support from the manufacturers. Until people can plug stuff in and have it just work (i.e. be better than windows) linux is going to be marginal on the desktop.