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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
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
(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
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.
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.