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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."
What kind of a geek misspells Bawls? And an editor at Slashdot no less. For SHAME!
I am stunned. That is a lot of code to write. That guy is a machine. Props to him 100%.
An amazing feat, this man should be recognized. Linux will never be on the desktop if your teenage daughter cant videochat with predators 2000 miles away! I for one welcome this new voyeur overlord.
And even the summary title wants to short him for 99 cameras to his credit!
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Thank you
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?
Wouldn't it be better that an ill-supported webcam gets abandoned by the consumers, thus giving the market better-supported webcams as manufacturers are forced to lift up their games?
Would you buy a (oh no not again) cheap car with an oil leak, knowing that there's a free and simple way of fixing it? Or would you demand the car manufacturer to get its act together and fix the leak before its cars get out of the factory?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Either way it's a lot, but the Slashdot editors really suck.
I don't respond to AC's.
from the twelve-cases-of-ballz-later department
Just don't ask how a physician gets twelve cases of balls... *crosses legs*
Mad props 733t d00d, or insert your favorite way to say, great job, thank you, and keep up the good work.
important enough for his name to get into a Slashdot summary. Oh well, at least he wasn't referred to as "the French Linux driver guy", like how Ramanujan was "the Indian math guy".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Wow that must be a lot of copy-pastes. His left arm little, middle and index fingers must be pretty fatigued by now.
One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do.
Should read:
One man with drive, tenacity, no funding, earning his livelihood elsewhere, and with no one to question whether he earned a dime doing this and with no shareholder expecting you to maximize your profits does what no one else can do. A corporation will start off asking "How many people will use webcams on linux and how much $$ can we make if we write drivers for them".
The man wrote 350+ drivers. How about some link love for him, slashdot? http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html
Not Dyslexia, it's Dyscalculia when dealing with numbers.
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
Should have just said "300, give or take 50."
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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.
Too bad all the stupid chicks that show their tits, don't use linux.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
So where is the heroic bureaucrat who can get this hellhole running so efficiently, that all the labour can be done by a single Australian man?
Fuck Slashdot
Maybe, but according to the article, he has had sex at least two times more than you have.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
one can argue that this was not entirely the fault of Slashdot editors. Maybe the real number was 532?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Welcome our French Linux contributors.
I also want to extend my appreciation to France for helping to spread democracy and freedom to the former United States of America,
now called, the United Gulags of America thanks to the Chairman, The Military-Industrial-CONGRESSIONAL Complex.
Patriotically as always,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
What we need, obviously, is a Beowulf cluster of French Physicists.
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.
Saddam is no longer in a position to write drivers. That's why Vista users are SOL.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
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
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
And again France helps America win it's freedom!!!
(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
You don't know that his daughters aren't twins.
You're probably right, though. With the last name Xhaard, I bet his sex record could make Ron Jeremy envious. Darn Frenchmen!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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.
This is a business model waiting to bring in the big bucks. Get some VC, some quality hardware people and have this guy join the team. Make good, true x-plattform cams. Profit.
A man with an asset like the knowlege he has is a gold mine when treated the right way.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If of course, by "in history", you mean other than 99.9% of the rest of history.
The French are notorious for not giving up, with one exception, when their "allies" deserted them with the entire German army on their doorstep.
"Liberty or Death" is a false dichotomy, and a phrase that can only be repeated by someone that has never had to make that choice.
You don't win wars by dying, you win them by living.
Anyone else start to hear the movie trailer guy's voice reading the summary?
In a world of drivers gone mad... one man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do...
French surrender jokes are the favorite joke of people who know just enough history to know that the French surrendered to the Germans during WWII. These surrender joke tellers probably learned this history when they read someone else's surrender joke and then figured out what it meant. It makes these people feel smart that they now know enough history to make this joke. There's probably some internet law that states that any story involving France or the French will eventually accumulate a surrender joke in the comment area. Jokes like these are the essence of not funny.
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
In other news: French physician sets record with 352 online girlfriends. "I just really like a good web strip tease," said the Frenchman.
Seriously though, bravo to the guy for improving driver support in Linux, it's more or less the one big lacking Linux needs to overcome.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
A smart post. But he said he's American. But it's actually insightful. But he's an American. Gargh! My mind can't handle the upheaval of reality!
I hate printers.
Um. We already make that endless stream of jokes, man.
Want them to stop? Stop being so pissy when they're told.
I mean, we're rather used to the fat, stupid, lazy american jokes, even if by and large they're not true. Do they stop? Dunno. Don't care. They're usually passed in mean spirit (whereas you can hardly consider 'surrendermonkey' as meanspirited; it's got the word 'monkey' in it), and I kinda just ignore such things.
"Think about it, would you really like the rest of the world to hold you - as individuals - responsible for the actions of your leaders?"
Lots of people do; why do you think the US considers our president such an embarrssment? Not saying it's right, but it *is* par for the course.
Also, I'd like to state for the record that it's fundamentally impossible to pin down the behavior of americans in general; geographically alone, we're too damned huge to be homogenous. Add to that the level of cultural difference you can experience in almost any large city in the world by walking two blocks, and you'll get the idea.
Anyway, in short, get the fuck over it, surrendermonkey. ^_^
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I'll cut that off right there, since the reasons they are beyond the pale to Americans are because they don't glorify America, and because they aren't about Americans. We're so self-centered that even movies about Britain need to be about Americans in Britain.
Not speaking for all Americans, hell, I'm not even speaking of my own views, but mainstream American culture disgusts me.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
A riddle:
Is it better to be a Cheese-eating Surrender Monkey, or a Burger-eating Invasion Monkey?
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?
I'm more interested in the name of the developer. How could he not be an elite hacker, with a name like Doctor Xhaard?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You wrote emacs? ;)
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"?
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 ]
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
False dichotomy, the correct answer is Cheeseburger Eating Isolationist Monkey!
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
'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