I'm trying to use my webcam (Quickcam Messenger) in an IM in gentoo linux. The modules install fine and the sample of the video is never jerky. Unfortunately, even though I have instlled Amsn, Gaim and Kopete, none of them seem to support the webcam well. Either the webcam doesnt work at all or when it does work, its extremely slow (like a slide show) when compared to the refresh speed in windows. The fact that it works at normal speed when I test the feed of the webcam as a stand-alone leads me to think its the net connection or the software. I've checked the speed of the connection and its no slower than when i'm on windows. Has anyone else experienced it? is it due to linux or can I tweek my network settings to make the transmissions faster? I have a feeling theres a bottleneck somewhere...

much thanks

If you can identify the application running the webcam by name, and you do a ps -A in a terminal, what prioirty it assigned to it?

It might be that something you are running concurrently with the webcam app / chat app has a higher priority, and thus it slows down the process / applicaton handling the webcam. If you can identify a culprit, or even just the webcam app itself, you can give it a higher priority in the system so that it runs faster?

Okay will check this out, so you dont think its the network which is slow? i.e going through my firewall.

Could be - any idea how much data the webcam needs to transfer for a frame? What is the frame rate it runs at? Maybe if you can somehow set it in software to use a lower framerate, it might reduce the data bandwidth needed for transferring a video stream off it...

I dont have much control over the data tranmitted by the camera. I use the SPc5xx driver which seems to set everything up for me. I would try to use VLC to simply stream my webcam video but is doesnt seem to like opening the feed from /dev/video1 (my webcam device)