[AG-TECH] WebCam

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Chris,

> I'm specifically after a webcam to set up on my desktop machine that
> will work with AG2.4 and 3.  My OS is Ubuntu 6.06 but I'm not to sure if
> the AGTK has been packaged up for it yet, so will probably just dual
> boot Fedora.
>
> Is there any recommended webcams?

AG vic and the AccessGrid toolkit are using the video4linux ver 1 API, not 
the newer V4L2. This hasn't been a real problem in the past, as the majority 
of the V4L2 drivers came with a V4L compatibility layer. But now as V4L 
support is going to be dropped from newer kernels soon, the newer V4L2 
drivers tend to only support the V4L2 API.

So AG 2.4 and 3.0.1 doesn't work with the new Linux UVC (USB Video Class) 
driver:
  http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/
which will only support V4L2.

I'm in the process of modifying vic to use V4L2 (with support for multiple 
colour-space formats as used by webcams) and modifying the AGTk code to use 
V4L2 to interrogate the video capture devices. I'm using the PWC webcam 
driver (note: I don't think PWC capable webcams are still sold.) for 
testing. I might have something ready in the next couple of weeks.

I will probably retrofit V4L2 support for AG2.4 Fedora RPMs.


Doug