23 October 2009

Better webcam support

One of the features listed at every Fedora release is Better Webcam Support and as it does not sound very sexy, it tends to get overlooked, I don't think I mention it myself when translating a summary of the features in a new release. Shame on me.

More than one year ago I got a "free" cheap and poor webcam (read 'crappy', powered by the sn9c20x chipset)- it was thrown by the store at a bonus when purchasing something (IIRC a scanner). My frustration with grew fast and large, wasn't able to make it work on Linux, so I just gave it away to a colleague to use it with Yahoo Messenger on Windows.

Fast forward today, the webcam returned to me and on a whim I said to myself "what will happen it I plug it into my newly installed Fedora 12 Beta?"

better webcam support fedora 12

Pleasant surprise: it worked! Sure, not the best image quality (the camera is cheap and not new any more), but I don't really need it for anything.

So yes, there are things to complain in F12, but also there are a lot of enjoyable parts.

2 comments:

  1. Support for sn9c20x was introduced with the webcam feature for F11 AFAIK. I had one of those too until recently - a "Typhon Webcam USB 330K" or something like that. The company that produced them has closed down (hurray!) and now, there's no longer windows drivers for that thingy on the web :D but works perfectly in Fedora :D

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  2. You are warped..... :D

    I have also ordered a cheap(ish) webcam and I'm looking forward to playing with it in F12.

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