I have a USB Creative PC-CAM 300 digital camera/webcam which takes photos, audio (.WAV), and video with audio (.AVI). When I used to use it in Windows it worked great, it would import all the photos, audio files, and video files without problems.
Now when I use this PC-CAM 300 on Linux, Digikam 0.6.2 will bring in the photos and video in the camera and the photos can easily be viewed without a problem. However, the video files are imported with the filename similar to: "Movie0000.UNSUPPORTED" always with the word "unsupported" at the end instead of .AVI. If I try loading these files in a media player I receive an error or some players like MPlayer freeze completely. I've had all the codecs installed for MPlayer so I wouldn't think that would be an issue, but still these files refuse to load. I tried renaming them to .AVI files but they still give the same error.
Creative's website didn't help me, but I did discover
http://opensource.creative.com/ which had a page for PC-CAM 300 and when I clicked on it it lead me to the
SPCA50X USB Camera Linux Driver page at Sourceforge. Now I didn't try the cvs of the spca50x project(s) but I did click the link on the spca50x page to lead me to
http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html which is where it says they get their experimental version(s) for the drivers for this and
other cameras.
On that page I found a utility called "SP54 converter A tool to convert SP54 codec from Sunplus to a movie playable MJPG avi file. Usage : sp54convert infile outfile"
So I tried that program with the individual movie files downloaded from my PC-CAM300 camera to digikam. Nope, it didn't work. I wasn't even sure this was the right utility to use. Now that page appears to have several things to capture/save video files with my camera and others but I was looking for something that would make already saved video files work.
I was even curious if I could install the Windows software/drivers for this camera from the CD-ROM that came with the device under WINE, but when I tried this the Windows software worked in WINE (but not with the camera, it couldn't find it cause it wouldn't install the drivers) but the drivers wouldn't install.
So I know that it may be possible to use drivers to capture/save video with this camera while it's plugged into the system (but I haven't tried it yet) but what about when one takes video without it plugged into the system and wants to move the video files from the camera to the hard drive and view them?? What program would work?
Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks for reading.
