Linux webcam saga

Monday, October 10th, 2005

I can’t remember how many times I’ve tried to buy a cheap webcam for Linux and thrown it away after about a year of fiddling with it. Each time, I try to be more careful about doing the research and buying one that has actually been reported to work under Linux. But somehow every device that once worked is now no longer sold, or if it is, it now has a completely new chipset.

So here I begin my pseudo-serious attempt at actually plodding through the steps to make this thing actually work.

The hardware I begin this story with looks like this:

• webcam
  • D-Link DSB-C310 PC Camera
  • H/W Version: B1
  • S/N: Bw03252000517

My kernel is a rather crusty 2.4.20

The driver for this device is the ov511 (http://alpha.ovcam.org/ov511/) Version 1.63 of this driver is already in my kernel. If I want the latest driver (1.65), I’ll have to actually do some work.

First try If I plug in the device, I see these messages in /var/log/messages:

/etc/hotplug/usb.agent: Setup audio for USB product 5a9/8519/100
devlabel: devlabel service started/restarted

The green LED on the camera lights up (this is better than I can get from Win2K) and I see the following modules loaded:

ov511
videodev

Seems pretty good, eh? So maybe it will just work… The instructions for the ov511 driver recommend trying vidcat or xawtv to test the device. I downloaded and started a compile of vidcat but found that it depends on some font resources that I don’t have. I’ll have to revisit the install of vidcat at some point if nothing else works.

I have xawtv installed so I fire it up:

xawtv
This is xawtv-3.92, running on Linux/i686 (2.4.20-6)
can't open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l-conf had some truoble, trying to continue anyway
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l2: open /dev/video0: No such device
v4l: open /dev/video0: No such device
no video grabber device available

Huh. I don’t think it means the device file is missing… because it is right there with wide-open permissions.

Next step is to see if the video4linux and video4linux2 packages have any useful documentation.