Slashdot Mirror
Lone Programmer Writes 352 Webcam Drivers For Linux
mrneutron2004 writes "A French physician and ardent Linux supporter is the one man you can all thank for adding support for 352 webcams in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do. And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
Either way it's a lot, but the Slashdot editors really suck.
I don't respond to AC's.
The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
> So a bad driver caused him to give up on W2K, then he proceeds to
> spend endless hours of creating drivers for those crappy webcams?
No, that guy you quoted is the article writer not the driver writer.
If I've read this correctly, it's the author of the article that bought the webcam to use it on W2K. The coder bought the cams for his daughters and noticed there wasn't any linux support, so he took the matter in his own hands.
Not Dyslexia, it's Dyscalculia when dealing with numbers.
No, you misunderstand. The person who gave up on W2K is the reporter, not the guy who created the drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers did it because he bought webcams for his daughters and they didn't have drivers.
As for you comment, it's not the camera that has the problem; it's the drivers, and that's what he fixed for Linux. In your analogy, it's more like buying a used car with a heavy discount because it has a dirty air filter. If you know that the car is perfectly fine with a new air filter, why not buy it? A famous man once said, "A dirty air filter does not a bad car make." (Okay, I admit it, it was me, just then, and I guess I'm not that famous.)
If you read his CV on his website, you'll notice that he is a physicist, not a physician.
The confusion stems from the interview, where he calls himself a physician:
physicist is called "physicien" (pronounced "physician) in French !
Stephane
The programmer did not write 352 seperate drivers for web cams, he wrote drivers for 8 different camera bridge chips and different versions of those chipss.
His name is Michel Xhaard.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
See my other post, it's the same thing as with sound cards for instance. Linux doesn't have a driver specifically for the "Creative SB Live Value", it has a driver for the EMU10K1 chip the card is based on. This driver works for several models of the SB Live series, and perhaps even for non-Creative cards if some other company builds cards using the EMU10K1 chip.
From TFA: FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.
factor 966971: 966971
Because while they were creating standard driver profiles for mass storage and ethernet they forgot to make a standard for webcams.
Really quite stupid, too. But then, USB is shit.
Note that there is a standard for video on firewire, but it's a crap one as it mandates a fixed resolution.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The article and the summary say that this guy is a physician, but he isn't. He's a physicist. The French word for physicist is physicien. Apparently someone got their words mixed up (but that's okay because they also appear to have their digits mixed up anyway).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_clas s
But since the cameras are essentially fixed-focus NTSC CCDs with framegrabbers, USB bridge chips of the week and ad-hoc Atmel microcontrollers with random firmware tying it all together... it's no wonder the Chinese OEMs just roll their own protocol and driver.
Implement a published spec! That'd take testing beyond plugging it into the engineer's laptop to see if it works.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have to applaud this person for the huge work he has done to support all these webcams under Linux. However, from what I could tell from a quick google search, he seems to be one of these developpers who write GPL drivers for Linux (also GPL) but then refuse to have them included in the mainline kernel for some mystical reason.
This situation really makes me sad because thousands, perhaps millions of people could have their webcam "just work" out of the box, but instead, they have to do all sorts of voodoo magic (look on google, find the package, compile it, patch source etc.). Statistically, a percentage of these people will spend a lot of time getting it to work, some people will fail to make it work and some won't even bother. What a waste.
The worst part of it is that the driver, being GPL, could be included legally without the autor's consent however, this would risk alienating this valuable developper. Imagine if the people developping drivers for motherboard chipsets had the same attitude and what that would do to the usability of Linux.
So please, Michel Xhaard, do a huge favor to the whole Free software comunity at little or no cost to yourself and get that driver in mainline.
Windows on the other hand, gets more and more obscure with each passing day. Starting from XP it reboots instead of letting you see the BSOD, so without considerable effort you can't even find what went wrong. You go to make tea, come back, and the box mysteriosly rebooted meanwhile.
Sorry, thats just because you're an idiot. Or at least, not on the same level as someone capable of writing drivers.
On win2k, XP or Vista now, you can decide what the system does with a "bluescreen" (under My Computer->Properties). Rebooting immediately is the default since thats preferable for 99% of users, but there's a checkbox to display the bluescreen anyways, and write out a full or partial memory dump. Using microsoft's free kernel debugger, you can then analyze that crashdump. It's relatively easy to pin down which module caused the crash...
Oh, and I love "gets more and more obscure with each passing day" - starting two years ago or so, microsoft set up a symbol server so you can automatically load operating system debugging symbols for the exact binaries you are running with. Makes the above debugging process a lot easier....
You only need an email address (or phone number) to send paypal money. And here you go: mxhaard@magic.fr
Paypal link: Send money - Enter email or phone
-- Note: It's on his website as well: http://mxhaard.free.fr/apropos.html
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Man, tell me about it. I'm still exhausted from typing "emerge gspcav1"...Glad I'm not using Ubuntu, or I'd have to do about twice as much work! ("gspcav1" being much shorter to type than "gspca-source"...)
Okay, in fairness, it actually was kind of a pain finding this package in the first place, but other than that, the three different types of webcams I have floating around all DO seem to "just work" with it. And don't let the "2.6.19" thing on the Gentoo package page fool you - it seems to at least compile for 2.6.21.
Now, does anyone have any good recommendations for webcam capture software? (How the heck do I get mencoder to use the webcam for input, anyway?...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Don't forget the franco-prussian war, the french revolution, and Henry V. After Henry, they had to have a girl take it back. Seriously, the french have lost a LOT of wars. And a lot of them were on their own ground, too. It's one thing to lose your colonies; that happens to everyone. But to get repeatedly pwned over the centuries is sort of special, I think.
A driver is basically a look-up table with settings. Get over it.
Funny. The last driver I worked on had 3 embedded compilers, a full OS abstraction layer, garbage collector, and more than one look-up table. Drivers for similar devices have got more complicated in the time since then.
You haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Get over it.
What would Lemmy do?
You mean if he knows how fast he wrote the drivers, he has no idea where the drivers are?
He should have also given the project's page :
Here is the link
This is specially important because the most logical place people would try first, the official SF project, is lagging behind and not up to day.
Thank you, Michel Xhaard, for your wonderful work. Thanks to you my own Logitech webcam, as webcams of other geeks around the world, have worked wonderfully for the last few years on Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You just lost an excellent opportunity to keep your mouth shut. "He didn't even make the deb pkg files"... What else, do you want mr. Xhaard a hot cup of latte in bed with those? Most distros I've used, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, already package his drivers. I know it because I've used them for months now: If you've ever used an spcaxxx-based webcam, the driver was written by him.
God, I shouldn't need to write this.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Or to make things worse, they take things that the Brits did (before the Yanks entered the War) and pretended that Americans did it. :)
in my opinion, king leopold didn't meekly capitulated, he did what he had to do. the belgian army was pounded by armour and air divisions. the germans had broken through the lines and king leopold had said if this were to happen they would have to surrender to both the french and british. however, the message arrived too late and the rest, as they say, is history. if he had not surrendered, his people would have been butchered into submission anyways. he had to save the lives of his people even if it would cost him his freedom. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,8 51143,00.html
'he seems to be one of these developpers who write GPL drivers for Linux (also GPL) but then refuse to have them included in the mainline kernel for some mystical reason'
Well I emailed him and got this reply:
'It is not "mystical reason", but a physical one: The mainline kernel did not allow video decompression. Gspca decompress the video in the kernel'
davecb5620@gmail.com