Quoting Pragnesh Sampat <pragnesh_sampat@xxxxxxxxx>: > I have been lurking around for the past few days on the list to see if I > can get this answered. > > I am thinking about buying a webcam. I am running redhat 7.1 (with an > updated kernel 2.4.3). > > Any suggestions on which cameras I should look at? USB or not? I am > willing to spend upto US $150 or so. > > I mostly intend to use it to capture pictures of my baby (in Wexford, PA) > so that my family in India can see her. I am curious to checkout how well > this works (I have a DSL connection and they have a dialup one). I will > connect the camera directly to server, which is at my home. For this purpose just buy a still image digital camera (like photo camera). A cheapest digital camera will yield better pictures than a most expensive USB live image (web-) camera. Consider that seriously. I have both, and the digital camera (Canon S100) is really good. Consult gphoto.org site to choose a supported camera. I doubt that a) you will be keeping the child in front of the webcam 24/7/365 :-) b) your family will be waiting in front of the computer 24/7/365 to catch you or the child running in front of the camera, especially when dial-up is costly and inconvenient to keep watching for long. Well-chosen, large, colorful still images are far superior to any grainy, poorly white-balanced, interlaced output of modern/cheapo webcams. Your family can print them, put them on a wall etc. etc. and they don't need a computer to look at them. That is my opinion, FWIW. If you -really- want a live image camera then read on. > Also, does the procedure below look OK (more or less)? > > get camera OV511-based cameras are plentiful and well supported. See http://www.linux-usb.org/ for brand names. IBM cameras (made by Xirlink) are reverse-engineered and not recommended unless you are stuck with the device. CPiA chipsets seem to be obsolete, but they work. Philips cameras seem to yield the best quality and frame rate. The developer had full set of specs to work with. But I never had a Philips camera to compare. > get driver Driver should be in the kernel already. > get xawtv (for example) > make sure the camera is recognized (load driver correctly) > use xawtv to get a jpeg file from /dev/video0 and put it somewhere in the > www area (at some rate) There is a program in xawtv package called 'webcam' - it does that. However it is not necessarily perfect for USB cameras; some people complained that it grabs the frame before the camera has a chance to settle its AGC. (USB cameras may get powered on when opened.) > get the web server to execute a cgi script to read this jpeg file and > refresh (at some rate) Yes. Refresh is done by the user agent (browser). Cheers, Dmitri -- "If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system." (By Linus Torvalds)
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