Webcam, Linux, Skype

I mentioned back in August that one of my current technical challenges was to get a Logitech webcam working with my laptop, which is running SUSE Linux 9.3 Pro. More specifically, I recently bought a Logitech® QuickCam® for Notebooks Deluxe because it's a nice small unit that is the right size for travelling, and clips neatly onto my laptop screen. I knew that I would probably have to do a bit of searching to find the right driver for Linux, but my experience is that there usually are drivers, and you can find them after a bit of searching on the Web.

In this case, though, I couldn't find any specific reference to using this model of Webcam with Linux. There are other Logitech webcams for notebooks that use Philips hardware, so I tried the pwc webcam driver. That didn't work, so I posted to the pwc mailing list, hoping somebody would know where to send me. Luckily, someone did.

Michel Xhaard, author and maintainer of the spca5xx webcam driver, was extraordinarily kind in reviewing some debugging traces from my system and determining that my webcam had spca5xx hardware. He added support for it, and voila, I now have a webcam driver! Using his 'spcaview' application, I was able to see live video of myself (I won't post any, though, you aren't missing anything, trust me). It's a thing I like about Linux, that people are so helpful in these situations.

With the camera part of the webcam working, the next thing I wanted was to be able to use the webcam microphone with Skype, since my laptop doesn't have a built-in microphone. Now, Linux can be tricky for audio and video, because there are various libraries that provide the basic facilities, and the choice makes life harder - which do you choose? For audio, I've tried to stick to ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), since it seems to be the latest thing, and seems widely supported. However, there is still a lot of software that uses OSS (Open Sound System), Skype included. There is an OSS compatibility layer built into ALSA, but I had to trust that it would work.

Using the ALSA 'arecord -l' command, I was able to see that the webcam microphone was being detected as an available USB microphone. The most useful page I found about sound for Skype under Linux gave me lots of things to try, but in the end, there was only one thing I actually needed to do. I needed to download, compile, and install the Skype DSP hijacker. It seems that a limitation of Skype under Linux is that it assumes that microphone and speakers are attached to the same sound hardware. With a webcam microphone, that simply isn't the case. The hijacker just tricks Skype into thinking it is dealing with one piece of audio hardware instead of two.

Results are fine, although I have to wear earphones to avoid feedback from the speakers. This is a pretty common problem with laptops, I find, if you try to use the built-in microphone and speakers. Headphones or earphones are enough to fix the problem, although you can go the whole hog and get a headset.

Now that I have a fully working webcam, it would be great if I could do videochat with Skype (or something equivalent). Unfortunately, neither the Festoon (formerly vSkype) nor the Spontania video plugins for Skype support Linux as yet. OpenWengo has support for Red Hat Linux, but it didn't run under SUSE 9.3, so I couldn't try it out. GnomeMeeting should work, but it would require me to get Windows users to use Microsoft's NetMeeting, and people are typically less enthusiastic about NetMeeting than about other IM clients (in my experience).

So it looks like my webcam will be effectively just a USB microphone with a built-in video camera, at least for a while.