With the recent release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), a lot of hype was generated (Overhype or well-deserved, that’s for another post). One of the main highlights of all the stories, news and reviews doing the rounds are that this is an LTS version. But many people, mostly those who are new to Ubuntu, and even a few who are already using it, are not sure what LTS really means.

For the past many years, I’ve seen a trend that has been on a meteoric rise. Whatever new service you sign on for on the internet (especially the web2.0–oh-so-cool-you-have-to-tell-everyone-about-it ones), it gives you an option to fill in your e-mail ID and password and makes a generous offer of letting all your friends know about your new avatar and let them all join in the fun. Most of the people around me, it seems, don’t think twice before gladly accepting the offer, as is made apparent from the increasing amount of automated mails I’m getting with subjects like “Hey, don’t be left out! Join me on X” or “Hi SG, Why don’t you follow me on Y”.

Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need.

Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer.

mplayer -fps 15 tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0

And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam:

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=60:height=40:fps=60:device=/dev/video0 -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o test.avi

Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. You could even cat the test.avi file into a folder of your web server and have instant streaming video :-) .

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop’s usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

[21328.211333] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
[21328.319698] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[21328.439705] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[21328.458509] zc0301: V4L2 driver for ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip v1:1.05
[21328.459113] usb 1-1: ZC0301[P] Image Processor and Control Chip detected (vid/pid 0x0AC8/0x301B)
[21328.520576] usb 1-1: PB-0330 image sensor detected
[21328.870287] usb 1-1: Initialization succeeded
[21328.870919] usb 1-1: V4L2 device registered as /dev/video0
[21328.871001] usbcore: registered new interface driver zc0301
[21328.913737] usbcore: registered new interface driver gspca
[21328.913811] ubuntu/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: gspca driver 01.00.12 registered

Great! Everything set up, I thought. But running various programs, camorama, camE, kopete, everything gave weird errors like “Connection could not be made”, “device not ready” or just showed a blank screen. But soon, after  few trial and errors, I found the solution. Basically the “zc0301” module is the culprit and all you have to do to get your camera working is prevent it from loading. So, this is what I did: