Video for linux

Saturday, April 2nd, 2005

I thought things might have gotten easier. Last time I tried to get a cheap webcam to work under Linux, I just ended up throwing out the webcam and not feeling too bad about wasting 20 bucks. This time, I did lots of shopping. I looked up drivers and tried to reference with cheap, available USB web cams. I suppose I was confounded by the principle of how people don’t bother describing easy things, but are more likely to blog about things that were hard. Still I found it remarkably difficult to find any success stories.

Eventually, I settled on a D-Link C310. That camera seems to be supported by a pretty standard driver. Getting it from Newegg was easy, it just showed up. Then I tried the naive thing of just plugging it in to Redhat 9, Yellowdog 4.0.1, and Redhat EL 4 WS. I was a little surprised that none of them could see it out of the box. I used the following references to try to make it work:

http://projects.stuartrharper.net/OV519.html
http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/

I’m spending the most effort on getting the yellowdog machine to work, and I’m tantalizingly close, but still can’t get the module to load. When I modprobe ov519_decomp it gives me this error

ov519_decomp: Unknown symbol ov511_deregister_decomp_module
ov519_decomp: Unknown symbol ov511_register_decomp_module