On this page I'm compiling a list of programs (both free and commercial) that seem to work with the Linux Philips webcam driver, possibly with some patches or tweaks. Please note that a mention on this page won't guarantuee it will work on all systems, kernel versions, distributions, etc, just that at some point someone got it working on some system. That's all.
Since I didn't write these programs (with the exception of CamStream) I cannot and will not provide support on them. It's simply taking too much time to answer mail after mail stating: "XXX doesn't work on my system, what must I do?". My initial reaction is always: get out your debugger and tell me WHERE it goes wrong; if it turns out to be a problem with my driver, then I'll fix it. But don't expect me to fix the program at fault.
So, first make sure you have the version mentioned on this page; sometimes newer versions break something, in which you should mail the author of the program, not me (in case a newer version of PWC breaks something, you should mail me!). Of course, submissions from readers are always welcome at webcam at smcc dot demon dot nl (address deliberately obfuscated).
Each program lists the program version number, the pwc version number,
and the (appearant) home page of the program. Some programs are commercial
(e.g. sold for money) but I do include them in this list since I believe
people should be allowed to make a buck or two from Linux also.
I usually try out programs myself, but some are written in environments that
I don't run and therefor cannot test.
Programs, in alphabetical order:
Programs that don't work:
Homepage: http://linuxbrit.co.uk/camE/ | Version: 1.1 (untested)
A webcam app with a lot of features, judging from the site... Text in image, uploading, archiving, etc.
Homepage: http://cserv.sourceforge.net | Version 0.42 + patch
Camserv is a simple program to provide 'streaming' video trough a webbrowser (using multipart GIFs or JPEGs). Includes a relay server.
Note: You need an extra patch for Camserv 0.42 to get it working properly with the Philips webcam (usual palette issue). The patch is on the camserv page.
Homepage: http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~elysium/programming.html | Version 0.3.4
A streaming webcam/client solution by Matt Painter, that can either work alone and save snapshots to disk, or provide a stream of JPEG images using a server and a Java applet.
Homepage: http://www.smcc.demon.nl/camstream/ | Version: 0.25 with PWC 8.0
My own programs that I'm testing with; in contrast to most webcam utilities it provides a nice GUI (you know, Graphical User Interface, so you can go clickety-click in stead of typing cryptic command lines :)).
It is useful for testing and supports some extra features of the Philips webcams, but the endgoal is to turn this into a general set of applications for video conferencing and broadcasting.
Homepage: http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ | Version 0.4.4 with PWC 8.0.
A complete and free solution for broadcasting audio & video over the Internet, live or pre-recorded in various formats. Includes various MPEG encoders, a server, and a software VCR.
Homepage: http://www.gnomemeeting.org/ | Version 0.10 with PWC 8.0.
Another H.232 (videoconferencing) tool, compatible with Netmeeting. It can work with or without a webcam (audio & audio+video mode). As it name implies, it's a Gnome application.
Homepage: http://www.marratech.com/download/ | Version 3.4
"The Marratech Work Environment helps groups of people to communicate, collaborate and manage information from their computers. It gives users a secure environment where members can talk with high quality audio, share information, pictures, MS Office documents and see each other." This is a video-conferencing tool that allows you to chat to each other, share documents, etc. using a client-server mechanism. The tools supports encryption and should work well with firewalls. The client is free; the server is payware, but you can download a free trial version of the server. Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS X.
Homepage: http://motion.sourceforge.net/ | Version 2.6 with PWC 8.0
Motion is a security tool; it detects movement in the acquired image, and triggers an alarm (mail, SMS, etc) when it does so. It also takes snapshots at regular intervals that can be combined into the digital variety of a security camera.
Homepage: http://www.fastpath.it/products/palantir/ | PWC 8.*
A "multichannel interactive streaming solution" optimized for low-end servers. The server software runs on Linux, but the image can be displayed in browser on almost any platform, as a Java applet or with a native Windows client.
Homepage: http://3demi.net/astro/qastrocam/ (site is in French) | Version 1.1 with PWC 8.0
A small GUI tool written by Frank Sicard for astronomy purposes: it allows you to play with the various settings in the cam and stack multiple exposures to get a better resolution and detail in faint objects.
Homepage: http://www.realnetworks.com/ | Version 9 (aka Helix)
Real Networks finally made a version of their software that is compatible with the PWC driver. Although you have to pay for most of their encoding software, you can download a free encoder (which has a few limitations, of course).
Homepage: http://sdlcam.raphnet.net
SDLcam is a fun tool for manipulating your images; it has options like rotation, inverse, red/blue swapping, dark image enhancement. The interface alone is worth taking a look :-)
Homepage: http://www.vanheusden.com/setpwc/
Folkert van Heusden wrote this command line utility for the PWC driver. It allows you to make adjustments for brightness, contrast, etc. and all the other PWC-specific settings (compression, the LEDs, etc). There have been a number of requests for such a utility, but I never got around to write it. However, thanks to the wonders of Open Source, you have one now :-)
Homepage: http://gecius.de/vgrabbj/ | Version 0.7.4 with PWC 8.0
A I-couldnt-find-anything-satisfactory-so-I-made-my-own tool by Jens Gecius. The tool has evolved quite a bit since its initial stages. Someone wrote that he needed to use the -S (swap RGB/BGR) option, so in case your colours are wrong, try that. Webpage includes link to his online webcam.
Homepage: http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/ | Version: 2.8-ucl-1.1.3 + patch
Note: This program does not seem to be in active development anymore. Sandro Wefel made a replacement for video/grabber-video4linux.cpp which will enable the YUV420P palette for VIC. Simply copy this file over the existing one in the vic distribution and rebuild.
VIC is a videoconferencing/broadcast tool with lots of available codecs; supports point-to-point and multicast (MBone). This version, by University College of London, is based upon VIC 2.8 from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. See the webpage for more details.
Homepage: http://bytesex.org/xawtv/ | Version 3.56 with PWC 8.0
The most popular tool out there; somewhat of a trouble maker, though :( Anyway, it works, and I even have a bit of advice for you. You can record AVI movies with xawtv, but its default framerate is set to 15 fps. However, the default for the webcam driver is 10 fps, so you might want to use the fps=15 parameter when loading the module. Alternatively, you can tell xawtv to grab only 10 fps; there is no way to set the framerate in the driver from within xawtv (xawtv doesn't really set a framerate; rather it grabs on average 15 frames per second, dumping the rest).
Second: the default imagesize of xawtv is 384x288. This size was previously not supported by any Philips cam, so you had to use the '-geometry' option. Since Release 6.2 the default imagesize is supported, but the image is padded with a gray border. If you want to get rid of this border, specify the image size like this:
xawtv -geometry 352x288-0+0
This places the xawtv window in the upper right corner of your screen with an initial window size of 352x288 pixels. Other popular formats are 176x144, 320x240 and 640x480.
This is a collection of tools for grabbing images from a variety of sources and displaying them on a webpage. Both 'vidcat' and 'w3cam.cgi' seem to work.
Note: this code is not very smart: you have to specify the YUV420P palette yourself (with -p y or in the w3cam.cgi.scf file). Furthermore, its way of probing aroud in video devices is braindead, to say the least... If you want to use the CGI program, specify an input and a norm of "-1" in the w3cam.cgi.scf file. Otherwise it complains about a VIDIOCGCHAN call (see your webserver log). As I said, this code is botched...