[AG-TECH] WebCam

[Chris Kendrick (VPAC)]

Hi Douglas, Piers, All

Thanks for you feedback with regard to webcams on linux.

In the end I went with a "Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000"

The system setup is Fedora Core 5 with AG3 and AG2.4 installed according 
to the following tutorial by Jason Bell
http://agcentral.org/help/tutorial/aginstallonfc5/

To get the web cam to work i just downloaded a driver snapshot from 
http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/snapshots/pwc-v4l2-20060627-042701.tar.bz2

make
make install
modprobe pwc or cd to the dir with "pwc.ko" and insmod -f ./pwc.ko from 
memory

Chris Kendrick
VPAC



To get it to work i just

On Thu, 8 Jun 2006, Piers O'Hanlon wrote:

> Hi Doug,
>
> Great to hear you're working on the code.
>
>> My code is more or less based on video/grabber-v4l2.cpp from SVN UCL
>> vic. The main issue the SVN code is that it only supports the YUYV pixel
>> format and not YUV420 common with webcams. Ideally I want to get it to
>> support all the pixel formats that the V4L version did.
>> 
> Yes this true - it's something I've been meaning to fix (there was
> some code from MASH that did a slighly better job).
>
>> There were other issues with incorrectly initialised ioctl arguments
>> with the PWC V4L2 driver and capture size.
>> 
> Ah ok.
>
>> > There are still a number of drivers in the kernel (including some for
>> > webcams) that are still video4linux version one only - Now all video
>> > capture devices are listed as /dev/video - one has to open the devices
>> > and see which ones can be opened with V4L1 or V4L2 - thus the UCL
>> > version compiles both drivers.
>> 
>> I'm currently compiling both, but the AGTk sets the VIC_DEVICE env
>> variable to let AG vic know which capture device it should use.
>> 
>> So in grabber-v4l2.cpp I currently have:
>>   #ifdef HAVE_V4L2
>>           const char *myDev = getenv("VIC_DEVICE");
>> 
>> and grabber-video4linux.cpp I have a ifndef version of the above.
>> 
>> Another approach may need to be used instead of the VIC_DEVICE env
>> variable, e.g. using the so called vic device nickname.
>> 
> oh ok - I guess another way would be to pass and device as a common
> line argument - or pick it up from the resources - like the most of
> the other config stuff.
>
>> > We are in the process having the AG features ported into the UCL
>> > version of vic - either by ANL or by UCL, we also plan to integrate
>> > work from NCHC vic - under our SUMOVER project - as mentioned by me at
>> > the recent AG retreat.
>> >
>> > We would welcome any developer work on vic - we are keen to bring on
>> > board any active developers and potentially provide commit access to
>> > the SVN repository.
>> 
>> I was actually going to contact you guys about merging my Mac TCL/Tk
>> Aqua AG vic port (in ANL's CVS) to UCL vic, but haven't gotten around to
>> it yet.
>> 
> This would be great - we'd like to have the aqua stuff and It would
> also be good to wrap in the video capture code for OSX (do have a link
> to the src of that grabber?)
>
> We can create an SVN account on our subversion repository if you would like.
>
> Thanks alot,
>
> Piers.
>
>> Cheers,
>> Doug.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>
>