Spent a lot of time this morning trying to get a Creative Webcam on Fedora Core 8 (FC8). My goal was to get streaming working from the webcam. Man, this was a pain and its still not really working. Here is what I did.

I plugged the webcam in. It didn’t just work — nothing popped up on my desktop. Dang.

[root@bigbird ~]# lsusb
...
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 041e:4034 Creative Technology, Ltd
...

Then I dorked around on the net and starting yum-ming everything that I could find related to webcam.

The one that seemed to work is here. I kinda half followed the directions. The atrpms was already in my /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo file. I just enabled the stable by setting enabled=1 (it was 0). I then did the following.

yum install gspcav1
yum install uvc
yum install camE
yum install camstream

I rebooted and camE worked.

I then tried to figure out streaming. Man, what a confusing mess. I pulled up vlc. When you open the device in vlc (video0), at the bottom of the page is a box for streaming. Select that box and then click on settings. Select “play locally” and “HTTP”. For the encapsulation method select “Ogg”. For the transcoding options, select “Video Codec” and then mp4v in the drop down. Under Miscellaneous check “Select all elementary streams” and set the time to live to 8. Then press OK.

To view this stream with mplayer, try the following:

mplayer http://localhost:1234

The ogg encapsulation is the only encap that seemed to let mplayer find the fps. I could not figure out how to find the fps on the other methods.

Note that I believe that you will need to fix the firewall (iptables) and probably something in SE Linux to get this stream off your linux box. Here’s a link that might help.