webcam is back

Posted by nuxi on 2010-Mar-17 at 19:41:08 in Site News (Login to reply)

I was finally persuaded to fix my webcam. The cam had been running through the qc-usb driver and a little xawtv utility. The trouble is that qc-usb is v4l and that doesn't work with the newer kernels. The nice thing about the xawtv plugin was that it automatically scp'ed the image to my webserver for me.

The new v4l2 layer of the kernel has built in support for my webcam, but I had trouble finding a [bold]command line[/bold] utility to power it. So many webcam apps will just try to pull in gnome :( I eventually went with fswebcam. I no longer scp images to my webserver, I setup Apache's mod_proxy to pull the image from another webserver (lighttpd) on the box the webcam is attached to. Seems to be working quite well so far. The init script wrapper I made for fswebcam doesn't quite have a working stop target yet though.

I'm considering rewriting my website in Python instead of PHP. The last major rewrite, going from MySQL to PostgreSQL, was definitely worth the effort. Not so sure Python has benefits over PHP though.