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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."
How about a link to his paypal account? Anyone?
I'd donate a few bucks.
step children in the computer world. Especially web cams.
Add to that the misery of attempting to hack to every proprietary firmware variation on every camera and hunting down someone who knows something about the camera firmware/driver and the misery is tripled. I know I owe this guy for my webcam working like magic.
In theory with SIP (VOIP) video conferencing is ready for the masses, but I still don't see web cams taking off as a kind of must-have accessory. You still don't see brands like HP jumping in and flushing logitech out of the business.
Anyone have any insight as to why that is?
The best one I ever saw was a USB product that was sold under the Kodak brand. I was shocked at how bad the integrated web cam in the mac laptop is.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I wonder whether he used an object oriented approach? Many cameras share common functionality, whether it be chipset or processing method, so much of that functionality could be inherited and tweaked according to the camera at hand. Doing so makes the task of targeting so many cameras that much easier. This is not to take anything away from the work this guy did, just an observation from the side lines.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I've long said usability is what has kept Linux from becoming a mainstream desktop (read: PC) OS. People like me (and I'm actually a Server Admin, mostly Windows servers, though I'm responsible for helping to maintain some Unix servers as well) who aren't n00bs by any means, but still find Linux to be fairly daunting in some respects (though it has made impressive strides over the last few years, Ubuntu, Slackware, and Suse spring immediately to mind, though my own preferred flavor is Gentoo). Why spend an enormous amount of time, and effort, and still have problems, when I could just install Windows, and go? This is a giant (imho) leap forward for Linux. Little things like this that seem arbitrary, or perhaps even superfulous, are EXACTLY the kind of efforts that the world of Linux needs.
Coming from a "die-hard" MS fan, I hope this stands out to someone. I've nothing against *nix, in fact I love my Unix servers, but as an everyday use OS, it leaves much to be desired. Now, it leaves one less thing. Die hard webcam driver making guru, I salute you.
the vast majority of USB video cameras are not UVC compliant. Even the expensive Philips chipset-derived models are in their own world.
UVC compliance is very recent and spotty.
There's 20-odd V4L/V4L2 drivers for linux, of which more than half are just pluggable webcam drivers (mostly USB, and the lone firewire generic)
There's some USB streaming chipset support for those external S-Video adapters and DVR devices, and the rest are PCI attached devices and the venerable BT848 driver.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
He did a great job. The only problem is that he doesn't tell you where to install the compiled files. There's no readme file and most every reference is in french. Not his fault for the french but he could have put an installer in there or a readme telling you where to place the newly compiled files.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
(Shameless plug) I had this tablet I'd spent $500 on back when it first came out, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get support for it on my favorite OS. It took something like 3 years to get it into shape, but now I have this project with a life of its own. Most recently I was prompted to add support for TabletPC computers running Mac OS X unsupported. All along the way, I've had people interested in the results, who have helped me to add support for their tablets. The internet has made it possible to collaborate instantly with people you've only just connected with for the first time, and do in a matter of days what might have taken weeks.
So it doesn't surprise me that this guy's driver works for so many cameras. So many of these hardware devices with different brand names use the same off-the-shelf chip-sets. And serial devices are all very similar in their protocols, so new drivers are easier to make.
I don't think my driver for their old serial tablets has cost Wacom much in sales, and that was never the intent. Their new USB tablets are thinner and totally hassle-free, which makes them attractive for most people. There have been a few people who told me they had specifically held out on buying a new Wacom USB tablet, and who either had put the old one away or were using it with Mac OS 9. And there were a few people who had bought USB-Serial adapters only to find that no driver existed to make their tablets work. I sympathized with both situations somewhat, and this also spurred me on.
As an open source developer I have the advantage of total loyalty to my project, and not to any other parasitic motive. So when I get a feature working in my driver or control panel, it remains available. A company may remove features to encourage upgrades, and reducing functionality for non-technical reasons is evil.
I propose a new holiday: Driver Writers' Day. It could co-incide with the date of the first shipment of Mountain Dew.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Yeah, but instead of writing one driver to support one chipset, he wrote one driver to support eight chipsets. Being able to get that right was probably annoying; consider how hard it is to get any driver right. Especially considering that these drivers were all reverse engineered.
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I'm quite thankful to Mr. Xhaard for his contributions, but how's about throwing some scratch to the man who single handedly wrote QEMU (One of the best VirtualPC-alike packages for multiple platforms, and whose code is helping the Xen virtualization project) , KQEMU (The fast VMWare-like add-on for QEMU), FFMPEG (The FLOSS project whose codec is helping Xine, you're probably using to view streaming video if you're not on Mac/Windows codecs), TCC (a tiny standalone C compiler, which in one demo was used to compile Linux from source and boot in ) ?
The guy's name is Fabrice Bellard, his site is also on free.fr , http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/
It's not very clear to me whether he's a physician or a physicist. It is a common mistake from French speakers to call a physicist, a "physician" since physicist translates as "physicien" in French. And the guy says he was working with doppler and ultrasound systems, which could be the case of either.
Well said! I'm an Aussie, I've lived in France for about 5 months, have quite a few American friends (but am yet to go there). In today's world, I'm sorry to all the Americans out there, but they are generally viewed as the absolute height of arrogant. When I was in France, I was often treated rudely, yes... until they realised that I was Australian, not American or English. English, because of the longstanding rivalry between the two countries, American, because worldwide they're pretty famous for their arrogance. In fact, most of my American friends are quite apologetic about it! :P
Feel free to blast me, but I'm just trying to say pot, kettle, black!
As an american, I believe I can say quite easily that our sports and pop culture suck. I don't give a crap about Britney spears, and our feverant love of professional sports is the most inane thing I can think of. That said, I think the relative merits of our political system are much more debatable despite the bad apples in it (at least you can point to the amended constitution for good clean fun). Also, if the Indians and the Chinese want to bring some competition, let them. If we can't compete with them, what's the point of being "superior"?
Americans are very strange. They think they're not British, yet retain the traditional British antipathy toward the French. Of course, Britain and France have been rivals for centuries, but France and America have never been, so why do Americans spend so much time abusing the frogs? I suppose it's the same national schizophrenia that makes Americans identify with the Rebelk Alliance in Star Wars rather than the Empire, which depicts them far more accurately. Americans charaterise the frogs as militarily incompetent or cowardly, totally ignoring Napoleon's extraordinary military achievements. Weird.
I'm English, of course, so I can say with easy conviction that I love France and hate the French. Especially my ex-girlfriend.