Problems with /dev/video???
 

Hello all

I am trying to set up a web cam under Suse 9.1 Proffesional and i was wondering if i am doing something wrong because i have not had any luck so far.

The webcam is a relatively old Creative Labs Webcam Live, it is one of these OV518 with a 6630AE sensor.

From what i found out it is fully supported by the ov518_decomp module.

After pluging it into the USB i had OV511 loading and things were showing that the camera was recognised (dmesg was not showing any error) but when i was trying to either cat /dev/video0 or gqcam -v /dev/video0 i was getting "Function not implemented" errors.

After some searching i found out that the type of camera i have is exclusively supported by the OV518_decomp module but when i was executing modprobe ov518_decomp i was getting FATAL:module not found errors.

So i decided to download the latest drivers, compile them and see how i go from there.

Downloaded, compiled, installed but still the ov518_decomp module can not be found and additionaly to that i now get the worst message that /dev/video does not exist!!!
This is strange because /dev/video which is a link (and exists on the filesystem) links to /dev/video0 which also exists and has the proper rights for me to access it...

dmesg reports the same messages about succesful installation (it even says OV518 decompressing capability. . . enabling - Or something like that but the meaning is the same :-) )

i have a 2.6.5-7.155.29-smp kernel and the OV drivers were downloaded for 2.6 kernel.

I am really out of ideas and although my webcam is not critical for my systems functionality i would like to get it working...

Any suggestions? :-)

I found it!!!

Besides doing all this that i was doing on the top i also had to modprobe -i ovcamchip.

After doing a cat /dev/video i was getting device not found error. dmesg reported from ov511 that the sensor was not yet recognised. So back to the driver page (http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/download.html) i noticed that i was not installing the ovcamchip module that was needed for my type of camera...

so to get a Creative Labs Live webcam (Model No PDO040) working under linux you need two modules loaded...

modprobe -i ov511 compress=1 (The 6630AE sensor transmits JPG compressed data)
AND
modprobe -i ovcamchip

After that XawTV and gqcam produce output. gqcam returns a bit of a garbled black and white output but xawtv provides a nice color image.

The quality of the picture for far objects is not the best, probably because of the compression.

Please note that the decompression presents a load to the CPU. Therefore the Frame Rate depends a lot on the speed and architecture of your system. In my 3GHz SMP P4 the framerate is more than 20 frames/second and the video out is very responsive. (It is going to be used as a sensor anyway, so the higher the FPS the better in my case :-) )