Hi,

I took the plunge and tried to use an Eyetoy webcam with pdp or Gem on Linux. This is a quite cheap webcam with microphone using a ov519 chipset.

The camera is supported on Linux by the experimental ov51x-driver from http://alpha.dyndns.org/ov511/download.html#ov51x which makes it available as a v4l-device. It can be opened just fine in both pix_video an pdp_v4l, however the picture coming from the device is not correctly decoded.

The ov519 chip *only* supports standard jpeg-compression and it *always* outputs frames in jpeg-format. I have no idea, what format Gem or pdp normally expect, but from the small bar of noise I get in the top area of the capture screen I guess, it's definitely not jpeg. ;)

The driver packags comes with lots of documentation (but partly in german) which also contains this quote

• For OV519 cameras: Standard JPEG Compression is used. You need an application that supports this. Only the included test/getjpeg program does so far as I know.

The getjpeg.c code to my eyes looks quite simple (at least it's very, very short), but I really don't understand all the v4l stuff yet and especially not, how this could fit into the architectures of Gem or pdp.

Would someone with more understanding of this than I like to have a look into this? I'm willing to compile and test a lot. ;)

Ciao

Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__