There seems to be a lot of interest in this little wonder of a webcam, but there is not much clear information on making it work (other than AlexP’s excellent work on Windows).
First off, my testing environment. Running Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 with a custom kernel. Note: the standard issue model should do just fine, mine is trimmed down and optimized for my processor. These instructions should apply just fine to other distributions, but you will have to modify the commands accordingly (such as using root instead of sudo, and your package manager). I am going to assume that you have a basic knowledge of the terminal and all necessary build tools installed ("sudo apt-get install build-essential” on Ubuntu).
Now, on to the fun stuff. Thanks to a group on Linuxtv.org, we have a nice new V4L driver available for this. The first step is to install ‘hg’ (included in the “mercurial” package on Ubuntu), and download the latest version of said driver:
sudo apt-get install mercurial
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~jfrancois/gspca/
You should have a folder named “gspca” in the current terminal directory. Now we want to change into that directory and begin the build process:
cd gspca
make
At this point, make might complain about any number of things. You will want to check and make sure it is installing for your *current kernel* (check with “uname -r” if you are unsure). That is the biggest issue. If it complains about something else, post here and I or someone else will try to help as much as possible. If your build is successful, go ahead and install it:
sudo make install
You should now have a patched V4L installed, and the driver should be working. Let’s go ahead and test this. Change into the test programs directory (assuming you are still in “gspca"), and build the driver test file:
cd v4l2-apps/test/
make driver-test
Now plug in your camera, and it is time to see if the driver install worked.
./driver-test
. This should produce an output string with information about the file format, and what is being transferred, etc.. If it says “no /dev/video*”, make sure the camera is plugged in. It seems to autodetect the proper video device, so other cameras or video capture cards shouldn’t be a problem.
If you have made it this far, congratulations. Time to see some actual results in video form. Install one of the configurable video programs (Mplayer, VLC, Xawtv, etc..). VLC is probably the easiest to use here so:
sudo apt-get install vlc
Open VLC, then go to Media > Open Capture Device. In the configuration window, set it to V4L2, video device: /dev/video0, audio device: /dev/audio1. Your video and audio devices may be different, this assumes no other video inputs and one audio input (motherboard mic input in my case). In a second or two, you should see some nice 640x480 video in proper color, and the audio should be working. This concludes this part of the install process, as I haven’t yet tried anything further myself (will test tbeta and some other programs soon and report back).
The problems seem to be: jumpy video, and VLC crashes if custom settings are used (e.g. for resolution and framerate). The occasional jumpy video can be blamed on the huge amount of raw video data being processed, and I am still looking into the custom settings problem. I imagine that as drivers for this camera progress, performance will too.
This concludes my tutorial, I hope it helps some. Please feel free to chime in with any questions or comments.
[edit] Oops, almost forgot to give credit. I had nothing to do with developing drivers, the guys at linuxtv.org (specifically “jfancois”, but I am sure there are others) took care of that. Getting it to work was largely thanks to excerpts from the PS2 Dev forums, specifically “jimparis” and “ao2”. Thread: http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=9238&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0