Hi Joe, On Thursday 02 July 2009 05:19:37 Joe Born wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm writing from Digital Innovations, and we'd like to donate samples > of our webcams to uvc devs in need.
First of all, thank you very much for supporting the Linux UVC driver project. > Basically, I'm working on a project to make sure that all our peripherals > are supported for Linux users. Not the usual "check the serial number to > ensure compatibility" type thing, but well supported in linux out of the box > (and listed on the box). > > We have an extensive line of peripherals, and I'm starting with > webcams. see www.digitalinnovations.com for more information about > products or forums.digitalinnovations.com for, you guessed it, the > forums we just started for our products. The webcams are not yet > listed on the store, but we do stock them. > > Please feel free to reach out to me directly with question etc. Most webcams are nowadays supported out of the box by the Linux UVC driver. Common problems come from - webcam firmware/hardware bugs that require workarounds in the driver or, worse, can't be worked around at all - multimedia integration in Linux (or lack thereof), and various bug in applications that make the user experience rather shaky Depending on how serious the FW/HW bug is, problems in the first category can be fixed remotely or require access to the hardware. I could definitely use hardware samples to (try and) fix the most serious ones. Some cameras also have bugs that can't be easily worked around. For instance, I've received reports of webcams that had a bad auto-exposure algorithm that got stuck in very low-exposure mode, making the image extremely dark. There's not much the host software can do about that. Fixing application bugs and improving multimedia integration doesn't usually require access to every webcam model. What is needed there is a few developers with free time and access to a few webcams. Providing hardware samples can definitely help. Obviously, bugs in proprietary applications (such as Skype) can not be fixed by open-source developers. The end-user might feel that a particular webcam model is "crap because it doesn't work with Skype", but little can be done about that if Skype is at fault. How many different webcam models do you plan to sell ? Do you plan to perform some basic testing yourself and provide hardware samples to developers when problems are detected, or would you prefer to donate hardware samples for all models to someone who would test them all ? Best regards, Laurent Pinchart _______________________________________________ Linux-uvc-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-uvc-devel
