First thing I needed to do was to find out what type of webcam I had.

lsusb | grep Logitech
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046d:08da Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Messanger

Now the gspca drivers finally got into the Linux kernel at version 2.6.27. Very nice, which means I don’t have to get the driver sources anymore. Recompiling my kernel got my webcam supported through the zc3xx driver of gspca.

make menuconfig
Device Drivers - Multimedia devices - Video Capture Devices - V4L USB Devices - GSPCA based webcams - [M] zc3xx USB Camera Driver
make modules_install
update-modules
modprobe zc3xx

So now I had a working v4l2 device. You can test whether the cam is working with:

mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0 -fps 25 tv://

 However when trying to run this as a v4l device (thus version 1), it fails. I had the v4l1_compat module loaded into my kernel, and still no go:

mplayer -tv driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0 -fps 25 tv://

Thus I installed the libv4l library, hoping it would allow me to preload the libv4l1compat.so and thus forcing it to look at the webcam as a v4l1 device instead of a v4l2 one.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so mplayer -tv driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0 -fps 25 tv://

And that worked like a charm…now trying this with skype almost got me where I wanted

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

The image, Skype produces, is still flipped of a vertical axis. No apparent reason why yet, since mplayer displays it correctly, using the preload with v4l1.

Let’s just hope no one notices… for now…

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