Ben wrote:
I'm after a couple of webcams with excellent low-light performance
(maybe even an infra-red option)
I've selected a Philips ToUCam II, which I got on eBay for $93ea.
including insured shipping, since they aren't available in Australia.
I have an older relative of the ToUCam, a PCVC-680 or something. They
work well in Linux, and are indeed very very good in low light.
Apparently it should work ok in Linux, so but I'll reply again when it
arrives.
The pwc driver has had a somewhat rocky history. It was originally
written by a guy who signed an NDA with Philips to get access to the
specs and wrote a binary-only driver. Then, after further consultation
with Philips, he was able to split it in to two parts - a basic open
source driver, and a secondary binary-only compression module needed for
higher framerates / resolutions. The base driver was added and removed
from the linux source tree a couple of times amid intense "discussion"
about proprietary, binary-only modules. The fuss it caused was one of
the driving factors causing the original author to abandon the project.
It's since been picked up by another group, who've also
reverse-engineered the binary-only parts, and now ship a single open
source driver that does everything the older two-module setup did. I'm
not sure if there's a module in the linux.org kernel or not at the
moment, but if there is, it's most likely the original discontinued
driver, and not the newer fork.
You can get the new driver from http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ , and
it's also packaged for ubuntu (and probably debian) as pwc-source.
Install that, and you should find some documentation in
/usr/share/doc/pwc-source/ that will let you build a package and install
it in a couple of steps.
Good luck!
--
Pete
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