Cheese / Webcam recording success stories? linux videobooth installations?

danpaluska · 02-12-2010, 03:08 PM

Not sure if this is right place or not but i'm looking for some success stories of Cheese and external webcams or built in netbook cameras.

Would love to see some actual examples.

Here is the type of behavior I seem to always* get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsW53o9kAXA

*I have tried 3 different computers, dell 8100 (1.5 ghz p4, 256 ram), ibm thinkcentre (1.4ghz p4, 512 ram), ibm thinkpad t42 (1.7ghz p3, 1gb ram)
and several different webcams (2 old logitech cameras, ps3eye, ms lifecam show) running either fedora or ubuntu.

see also this post for some other movies of a system i had similar problems with:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...webcam-783511/

here is a list of cams that work with skype but i find skype and cheese to be different as it's the RECORD feature that seems to cause the problems. displaying the feed is never too bad, but recording seems to break the feed.
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/SkypeWebCams

So i'm looking to know if anybody out there has had success with cheese or another webcam RECORDING program on linux. i'm working on several videobooth installations(http://broadcasterproject.wordpress.com) and would love to permanently ditch my mac for linux but having trouble finding acceptable performance in this area. any tips are appreciated.

and i'm happy to turn this thread into wiki page if there are enough responses.

thanks!
-dan

irmin · 02-12-2010, 06:54 PM

Hi,

I have two laptops, an Asus EeePc 900A and a Medion P6613, which both are equipped with a built-in webcam. These built-in cameras are connected internally via USB. Both use the uvcvideo driver. To record the video captured, I use mencoder:

Code:

mencoder -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:alsa:adevice=<alsa microphone pcm>:immediatemode=0:audiorate=48000 -fps 25 tv:// -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:acodec=mp2:vbitrate=1600:abitrate=192 -of mpeg -o <output file/pipe>

If you want to view the recorded view at the same time, you can view the output file with mplayer the same.

danpaluska · 02-16-2010, 02:31 PM

how exactly do i fill in the alsa part?

Code:

axiomtwvee@axiomtwvee:~/Videos/Webcam$ cat /proc/asound/version
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.20.
axiomtwvee@axiomtwvee:~/Videos/Webcam$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [Intel          ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
                      HDA Intel at 0xd02c0000 irq 22
 1 [U0x46d0x8dd    ]: USB-Audio - USB Device 0x46d:0x8dd
                      USB Device 0x46d:0x8dd at usb-0000:00:1d.3-2, full speed

also tried this line i found in another forum but it gives me an error about setting the norm. any ideas here?

Code:

axiomtwvee@axiomtwvee:~/Videos/Webcam$ mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:width=320:height=240:forceaudio -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=mp3 -ffourcc divx -o test.avi

MEncoder SVN-r29237-4.4.1 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
success: format: 9  data: 0x0 - 0x0
TV file format detected.
Selected driver: v4l2
 name: Video 4 Linux 2 input
 author: Martin Olschewski <olschewski@zpr.uni-koeln.de>
 comment: first try, more to come ;-)
v4l2: your device driver does not support VIDIOC_G_STD ioctl, VIDIOC_G_PARM was used instead.
Selected device: USB Camera (046d:08dd)
 Capabilites:  video capture  read/write  streaming
 supported norms:
 inputs: 0 = zc3xx;
 Current input: 0
 Current format: unknown (0x4745504a)
tv.c: norm_from_string(pal): Bogus norm parameter, setting default.
v4l2: ioctl enum norm failed: Invalid argument
Error: Cannot set norm!
Selected input hasn't got a tuner!
v4l2: Cannot get fps
Audio block size too low, setting to 16384!
Floating point exception

any ideas?
thanks,
dan