Hi all,

I have been looking at my options for using a webcam package on Linux.

It seems that the webcams a lot of people recommend are in the Philips Range.

Please can someone tell me how the drivers are coded / work for webcams using USB connections. Please can someone also tell me how they will differ from one manufacturer to another.

Many Thanks

Rob

This is the site that I used to find drivers for my cheepie digi/web cam. It required a bit of tweeking on my part on the drivers but got it working. Depending on what make and model: USB Cam Drivers

I hate to tell you, if your running 2.6.6 your in trouble for a philips cam. pwc (driver for the pro 3000/4000) does not compile right for 2.6.6 so it was removed.. dont let that stop you though, i have the pro 4000 from logitech (philips) and its great.. 2.6.5 runs it great. 2.6.6 im sure will be fixed.

check this site:

http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/

USB is software driven. Most of the data handling is done by the CPU. The reason why USB devices are different from one manufacture and to another is there is no standard way and many manufactures see this as an oppornity to brag what interface (protocol) is better. Manufactures changes their interface for each model they make, so this makes it even harder to reverse engineer it. USB Web cams are not that great for picture quality. Using a Web cam for conference software is lousy. Something like a PCI capture card will be a lot better and the conference software has the ability to compress the video much, much better than web cams. Many Philips chips are opened to the public, so programers can use it for any application and OS.