Video Conferencing On Linux
I have normally had a bad experience with multimedia related software till today. An expensive IBM PC camera has not been working for quite a while, so I had banished it to my family’s Windows XP machine. But I needed one to play with for my own FC3 linux box.
My hardware dealer at first insisted that I try out a damn cheap Chinese cam costing Rs. 950. The package was as cheap as it could be made, but the demo that he showed me was impressive. So I took it home, and guess what it still didnt work, coz’ there were no drivers.
So I returned it and got a Logitech Quickcam express instead (lsusb output: ID 046d:0870 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Express
). I had to google and get the drivers from http://qce-ga.sourceforge.net/.
Tweaking all the stuff to make it work was a bit of a story, and I would shortly put in up at http://www.lug-delhi.org wiki. The end result is:
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xawtv works.
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gnomemeeting can show my pic
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gnomemeeting can connect and work with a remote netmeeting peer.
The pictures below show how the cam looked out of the box, and how it can look after tweaking.
Before
After