Web Cams in Red Hat 7.3

Fri Sep 27 11:54:08 CDT 2002

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Patrick Thurmond wrote:

> 
> Hey everyone. I am going to be formatting my laptop and loading RedHat
> 7.3 on it within the next few weeks and I will also be purchasing a
> webcam/digital camera, the Logitech ClickSmart 510 Digital Camera. I was
> wondering if there is any software for using webcams and/or digital
> cameras via USB on RH Linux 7.3? Does RH come with the drivers or do I
> need to scrounge for them? Has anyone had any problems setting up a
> webcam on linux? I want to make a movie of my girlfriends baby for her
> and I wanted to know if I would have to stick with Windows to do this.

All webcams for linux should work through Alan's video4linux interface 
(/dev/video) and your redhat kernel should already have this compiled in 
modules.  Running any webcam aplication should work.  And you have 
choices.  Just look on freshmeat.net if you aren't afraid to choose.  You 
should have the xawtv package installed and it includes a handy command 
line utility called "streamer" that can take snapshots or full video feed 
from any camera.  xawtv is a simple GUI that will also allow you to take 
control of television cards.

I even hacked mine out with a little perl and called it cam.pl.  This 
little script in my html directory made a nice simple reloading page that 
worked with any camera I had laying around:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/htmlnn";
print "<html><head>n";
print "<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">";
print "<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">";
print "<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="9">";
print "<title>Live Webcam</title></head>n";
print "<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#FF0000" 
vlink="#800000">n";
print "<h1>Live Webcam</h1>n";
print "<BR><BR>n";
system ("/usr/local/bin/streamer -n ntsc -i Composite1 -o /home/httpd/html/cam.jpg");
print "<img src="cam.jpg" HEIGHT="240" WIDTH="320">n";
print "<br><br>NTP Atomic Clock Time: ";
$date = `date` ;
print $date;

#camera adjust
print "<FORM action="cam.pl">";
print "<INPUT type=submit value=LEFT>";
print "<INPUT type=submit value=RIGHT>";
print "<INPUT type=submit value="Ring Bell">";

print "<br>";
print "<br>Picture is updated at every refresh (15 seconds)";  
print "<BR><a href="faq">My webcam faq</a>n";
print "<br><a href="/"><b>Back</b></a> to my homepagen";
print "</body></html>n";