Video for Linux 2

This is a snap from the camera and it seems to be a decent quality. As far as the books, they are just there to make people think I am well read and if I could read, I bet they would be good books, cause they sure look pretty.

I decided I would revisit video for Linux and see if there was anything new to learn and perhaps I could get a better feel for the overall methods and provide some reference that would help to reduce the frustration that sometimes is generated by the comlexity of it.

To start I will cover the command line options. a simple "lsusb" will give you output like this:

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 046d:08d7 Logitech, Inc.

Now that you know it is there and you want to see how well it is supported, go here:

uvc devices are listed here.

A good command that will be informative is "locate uvcvideo" and the output should look something like this:

/lib/modules/2.6.24-24-generic/ubuntu/media/usbvideo/uvcvideo.ko

Then to see if it is a device loaded in the kernel "modprobe -l uvcvideo" and it should say the same thing.

Other useful commands are "v4lctl -c /dev/video0 list" and "v4l-info" Some of the output from v4l-info is here, but there is much more. I wanted to add that the source and executable for this is in the "xawtv" package if you are having trouble finding it.

general info
    VIDIOCGCAP
        name                    : "Logitech QuickCam Communicate S"
        type                    : 0x1 [CAPTURE]
        channels                : 1
        audios                  : 0
        maxwidth                : 640
        maxheight               : 480
        minwidth                : 160
        minheight               : 120

The program "cheese" seems to be the best at representing proper colors for my device type, but your mileage may vary. I tried several others including mencoder, which did a good job.

I know that it is not completely correct and has some things that could be implemented better for this specific webcam, and I got the source for them and intend to wander around a bit in the kernel driver, cheese and make a more integrated lower level interface for my ants program. Ontology is going well and the whole thing could be useful in a few more weeks. I have been working on this forever it seems. Always a new side trip and I hope I can stay on a straight path to integrating all this now.