Ik heb ondertussen een webcam gekocht. Het is uiteindelijk deze geworden. Hij werkt wel goed, ook op Linux :D Dus als er iemand wilt cammen... (A)

Voor de rest is er weinig gebeurd. Ik vul de dagen van de vakantie met chatten, smsen, netloggen en met vrienden afspreken. :) Vervelen doe ik mij dus ook niet :P

Wist ge trouwens al dat ge Rock Werchter kunt volgen op Studio Brussel?
Daar is zo'n programma dat "All Areas" noemt, en daar gaan ze op festivals verslag uitbrengen. (H)
Da's best wel cool om eens naar te luisteren :)

Logitech dio a conocer su primera cámara web compatible con Mac con tecnología de enfoque automático premium y lentes Carl Zeiss: la cámara web Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro para Mac, la cual ofrece detalles y claridad de imagen, y video con iChat y Skype.

La cámara web Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro para Mac combina tecnología de enfoque automático de Logitech con los objetivos de Carl Zeiss. La nueva cámara web utiliza un motor de bobina de voz para su sistema de auto enfoque, en lugar de un motor de paso. El enfoque es rápido y fluido, suficientemente claro en acercamientos extremos a sólo 10 centímetros del objetivo de la cámara.

El sistema de enfoque automático de Logitech compensa los cambios en la nitidez de los contornos de la imagen y vuelve a enfocar en menos de tres segundos. Y mediante su colaboración con Carl Zeiss, Logitech asegura que el objetivo cumpla con los estándares mundialmente reconocidos de Zeiss en diseño y fabricación para lograr una nitidez superior en un diseño compacto y ligero. 

El sensor de imágenes de 2 megapíxeles ayuda a la cámara Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro para Mac a capturar imágenes de video en resoluciones altas. Es apoyado por la tecnología RightLight 2 de la firma, que permite que la cámara se ajuste de forma inteligente en situaciones en la que la luz es insuficiente o cuando hay mucha luz de fondo.

Optimizada para la Mac

EN el uso de la cámara Logitech con iChat o Skype, se puede disfrutar video con calidad VGA en hasta 30 cuadros por segundo (cuatro veces más nítido y dos veces más perfecto que cualquier solución de video llamada) sin cargo adicional.

La cámara web Logitech está lista para trabajar en cuanto sale de la caja, de modo que puede hacer una videollamada de inmediato, no se requiere software. Cuando utilice su cámara web para grabar video que se almacena e disco o se envía a los amigos, la QuickCam Vision Pro graba videos claros en formato de alta definición de 720 (960x720 píxeles).

Para complementar el estilo de su computadora Mac, la nueva cámara web cuenta con un perfil en blanco y plata con un prominente micrófono integrado.

Esta cámara web Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro para Mac estará disponible en Estados Unidos y Europa a partir de julio, en América Latina a partir de octubre. El precio de venta es de aproximadamente 129.99 dólares.

“With this new webcam for Mac computers, we’ve integrated our most advanced video technologies to truly enrich your video-calling experience,” said Gina Clark, general manager and vice president of Logitech’s Internet Communications business unit. “The lens and autofocus, the sensor and the lighting software all contribute to create image-perfect detail and clarity. Whether you’ve used a standalone or an embedded webcam in the past, you’ll be amazed at the difference in quality our new webcam makes.” (link)

Primero lo hice en modo actualización en una partición donde sólo he instalado los paquetes básicos. Con ella y remastersys realizo un LiveCD que me permite instalar Ubuntu en cualquier equipo con la configuración completa de dicha partición. Pues el proceso de actualización fué magnífico. Una vez terminada y reiniciado el equipo todo genial a excepción de la tarjeta de video (tengo una nVidia GE7300). Pero como ya conozco el tema hice lo siguiente: Me fui a synaptic, busqué por envy, instalé el correspondiente a Hardy, lo ejecuté y al siguiente reinicio ya tenía mi nVidia perfectamente configurada. Todo eso en tan sólo dos minutos.

Luego me decidí a actualizar mi partición principal. La que utilizo a diario para todos mis quehaceres informáticos :)

Aquí si que me falló la actualización. Por más veces que lo intentaba no conseguía pasar del mensaje: Comprobando su gestor de paquetes. Teniendo en cuenta que en esta partición he compilado los drivers de la webcam quickcam express de logitech y de la tarjeta de sonido que viene incorporada a mi placa base no me extraña que se le atragante (por cierto, en la primera actualización ya me reconoció la tarjeta de sonido con lo que no tendré que compilar de nuevo los drivers Alsa). Además tengo repositorios de terceros con versiones más recientes que las que están en los repositorios de Ubuntu. Así que entiendo que el pobre no pasara del chequeo de mis repositorios y versiones. Pero no desistí de instalar el Hardy!! Hace tiempo decidí crear una partición sólo para los datos (directorio /home) así que realizar una instalación limpia no me asusta en absoluto. Así que:

1. Desactivé los repositorios de terceros
2. Creé una lista de paquetes instalados según te indican aquí.
3. Arranqué el equipo con el liveCD de Ubuntu Hardy Heron
4. Me fui a synaptic y cambié el servidor de repositorios a uno no oficial para que fuese más rápida la bajada y evitar el colapso de los servidores normales.
5. Comencé la instalación definiendo manualmente los puntos de montaje de cada partición
6. Terminada la instalación y reiniciado mi equipo entro con mi usuario y toda mi configuración visual, de datos, de aplicaciones, etc. están intactos (ventajas de tener /home en otra partición distinta al sistema)
7. Siguiendo las indicaciones del sitio indicado en el punto 2 arranco el synaptic y cargo las selecciones del fichero creado. Le doy a actualizar y .... uf!!! librería que causa problemas. Normal, si tenemos en cuenta que algunos paquetes del listado indican su versión. No me doy por vencido. Edito el fichero con la lista de paquetes y elimino todo lo que comience por: "lib" y voy dejando sólo aquellas líneas que hagan referencia a paquetes completos. Las librerías ya se encargará synaptic de instalarlas resolviendo las vinculaciones. Termino la edición y vuelvo a cargar en synaptic las selecciones. Actualizo y .... Genial!!! todo estupendo. Se pega unos 10 minutos bajándose los caso 400Mb de nuevos paquetes.
8. Cuando terminó la actualización activé la nvidia por medio de envy y.... Fin!!

Un hora y 10 minutos después de iniciado el proceso de instalación limpia tengo mi equipo con Hardy Heron y con todas las aplicaciones que tenía en Gutsy. Y todo funcionando al 100%. Bueno... todo no :( Al instalarse el Firefox 3 beta 5 me ha desactivado todas los complementos que no son compatibles. Pero esto será objeto de otro comentario en el blog.

However there are some ups and downs to it, including the microphone. You would never know that the microphone is supposed to cancel noise, as there is always a constant buzzing on it. It also fuzzes up if you talk very much more than a whisper. If i had to rate the microphone on the webcam it would be a 2 out of 10.

The Camera however is a different story. With an 8 mega pixel camera, it just amazes me how clear it really is. It looks sharp, and very clean. It also works very well with video editing software. That is about the only thing you can say about the Camera. It is very good.

Here are the specifications below that Logitech has posted to their website.

"Technical Specifications

• • Carl Zeiss® lens
  • Autofocus system
  • Ultra-high resolution 2-megapixel sensor with RightLight™2 Technology
  • Color depth: 24-bit true color
  • Video capture: Up to 1600 x 1200 pixels (HD quality) (HD Video 960 x 720 pixels)
  • Frame rate: Up to 30 frames per second
  • Still image capture: 8 million pixels (with software enhancement)
  • Built-in microphone with RightSound™ Technology

Here are the Computer Specifications that they recomend

Windows® XP

• • Pentium® P4 (or compatible) processor, 1.4 GHz (2.4 GHz recommended)
  • 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
  • 200 MB available hard disk space
  • 16-bit color display adapter
  • Windows®-compatible sound card and speakers (full-duplex sound card recommended)
  • USB port
  • CD-ROM drive

Windows Vista™

• • Pentium® P4 (or compatible) processor, 2.4 GHz (2.8 GHz recommended)
  • 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
  • 200 MB available hard disk space
  • 16-bit color display adapter
  • Windows®-compatible sound card and speakers (full-duplex sound card recommended)
  • USB port
  • CD-ROM drive"

Thanks Bradley Bradwell

Ps: All trademarks belong to their respective owners including the specifications, and requirements for the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000.

Power-on and Power off
The NSLU2 running OpenWRT has some odd characteristics. First, it will not automatically turn on when power is applied, and you can't make it do so without modifying the hardware (see here for a lengthy discussion of how to do so). You have to press the power-on button to get it to start up. Thats true of the NSLU2 generally and not OpenWRTs fault. Second, under OpenWRT, pressing the power button again won't turn it off. Thats something that isn't implemented, yet, in OpenWRT. Pressing the reset button will turn it off, but thats kind of awkward. Logging in (see below) and issuing the "poweroff" command will do so too.
I'm looking into ways of reducing the boot time from the present 55 seconds from power-on to first image, but I don't expect to get it down to less than 30 seconds.

Resolution
In my first post I skated lightly over the question of why the QuickCam is running at 960x720 if its supposed to be capable of doing 1600x1200. The answer turns out to be a bit complicated. The QuickCam can generate images in two formats, an uncompressed one known as YUY2, and a compressed form, M-JPEG. Compressing the images is quite hard work for the camera, and at the maximum resolution it simply can't do it, either because it takes too long or it doesn't have enough onboard RAM. And the difference in size between the compressed and uncompressed images is pretty huge, as you can see in the following table. These are all the available image formats >= 640x480 for the Pro 9000:

The problem with the YUY2 format is that its simply huge and generates 12-20 Mbytes/second. We can't move this over 100Mbit Ethernet, which will do 10-12 MBytes/second, tops. Even if we did, browsers don't understand it. It is possible to ask MJPG-streamer to read YUY2 and do the compression to MJPEG itself, but its hard work for the NSLU2 as well. At 1600x1200 it generates one image about every five seconds and seems to buffer about six images, so what you see is thirty seconds in the past. It also falls over with segmentation faults fairly frequently (less frequently with lower quality images). So full resolution is pretty much limited to snapshots (another subject I want to get into). The 960x720 JPEGs direct from the camera are pretty heavily compressed and the quality of the picture does suffer a bit. Less severe compression doesn't seem to be available from the camera, but I'm hoping I can find a way of getting it.

Autofocus
The Pro 9000 has a variable focus control. This is unusual on webcams, and allows it to focus on objects as little as 4-5 cm away. The MJPG-streamer software has an option that automates focusing, but having experimented with it I have not activated it in the firmware build. The reason for this is that the default focus seems to manage perfectly well between about 30cm and infinity, and the auto-focus is a bit painful to watch. It operates by checking the sharpness of the picture every ten seconds or so. If the sharpness deteriorates, it triggers a procedure that runs through the whole range of focus settings, and then picks the sharpest one. This works, but it can take at least ten seconds, and is easily fooled by movement. Unless you need this facility, its probably best left turned off.

Note that the manual focus controls in MJPG-streamer work just fine and let you focus down to a few centimeters.

Modifying the camera

If you want to know how to take the Pro 9000 apart, mount it in a box, and do things like attach a large lens to it you can photograph, say, craters on the moon, look no further than here

Low-level firmware access
If you have some Linux experience and want to get in and add packages or change settings, you can telnet into the firmware and edit the configuration files with vi. The firmware will advise you to set a secure root password, and thereafter you will need to log in using ssh and that password (this is, incidentally, essential if you are going to make the camera visible to the Internet at all). To switch to a static IP at 192.168.1.2, for example, you would edit /etc/config/network and change the line

	option proto dhcp

to

	option proto    static

        option ipaddr   192.168.1.2

        option netmask  255.255.255.0

The startup commands that run MJPG-streamer are in /etc/init.d/done. MJPG-streamer takes the following parameters:

-i | --input "< input-plugin.so > [parameters]"
-o | --output "< output-plugin.so > [parameters]"
[-h | --help ]........: display this help
[-v | --version ].....: display version information
[-b | --background]...: fork to the background, daemon mode

The UVC input plugin, input_uvc.so, takes these parameters:

[-d | --device ].......: video device to open (your camera)
[-r | --resolution ]...: the resolution of the video device, can be one of the following strings:
QSIF QCIF CGA QVGA CIF VGA SVGA XGA SXGA
or a custom value like 640x480
[-f | --fps ]..........: frames per second
[-y | --yuv ]..........: enable YUYV format and disable MJPEG mode
[-q | --quality ]......: JPEG compression quality in percent (activates YUYV format, disables MJPEG)
[-m | --minimum_size ].: drop frames smaller then this limit, useful if the webcam produces small-sized garbage frames which may happen under low light conditions
[-n | --no_dynctrl ]...: do not initialise dynctrls of Linux-UVC driver

The output HTTP plugin, output_http.so, takes these parameters:

[-w | --www ]...........: folder that contains webpages in a flat hierarchy (no subfolders)
[-p | --port ]..........: TCP port for this HTTP server
[-c | --credentials ]...: ask for "username:password" on connect
[-n | --nocommands ]....: disable execution of commands

The file output plugin, output_file.so, takes:

[-f | --folder ]........: folder to save pictures
[-d | --delay ].........: delay after saving pictures in ms
[-b | --bytes ].........: save only on change in picture-size
[-c | --command ].......: execute command after saving picture

And the autofocus output plugin, output_autofocus.so takes just

[-d | --delay ].........: delay after saving pictures in ms

I had followed the commands that are given there. Recounting them here..

aptitude install qc-usb-sources
cd /usr/src
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a build qc-usb
dpkg -i qc-usb-modules-[your_version].deb
modprobe quickcam


Now, firing up gqcam fails. In XTerm, it was exiting with message, device file not found. In /dev, the file that corresponds to the cam is /dev/video0. I did a ln -s video0 video and now gqcam show a vague resemblence if what lies in front of its eye.

Wow! never expected I'll get this cam working on this beige machine. Remember, the cam is no less than seven years old. It worked OK under Windows. But after quitting Windows, I had almost given up hopes on getting this cam work.

Now, gotta learn how to use this cam under Pidgin or such applications..

here is what 'lsusb' says about this cam: "Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046d:0850 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Web"

The QuickCam Ultra Vision is at the posh end of the market, with a price tag in ten thousands. It’s a large chunky affair that feels solid and very well made. It incorporates the RightLight 2 metering system, which promises "twice the image clarity of conventional webcams. The camera also features an f-stop setting of 1.6, whereas most Web cams on the market have an f-stop setting of 2 or greater. As such, the QuickCam Ultra Vision Web cam is able to capture more light.

QuickCam Ultra has a very unique shape and mount. The design is actually very impressive. The webcam itself is cylindrical but the camera is mounted inside the barrel rather than at the end. On the other side to the lens is a Logitech logo with a circular light that flashes blue when the camera is active. Right in the middle of the device, Logitech has integrated a microphone that yields echo-free audio output, making conferencing a pleasant experience. As you move to the side, each edge features a button; one that launches a mirror video window, so that people can check their image before they engage in a video call; and the other to take quick snapshots. The lens also rotates to capture various angles. The rubber extension is flexible and can be fitted to suit the shape of your laptop screens or LCD’s. But that’s it, the QuickCam ultra cannot be fitted on a CRT monitor or a laptop screen, and there's no way you can place it on your desk either.

The QuickCam Ultra Vision has a 1.3 megapixel sensor and a 5 element glass lens. The webcam promises highest possible quality image thanks to the on board Logitech RightLight2 Technology which even produces good results in dim, side- and back-lit situations. Video is reasonably smooth in "e-mail-size" (320 x 240 ) and VGA (640x480) at 30 fps, but becomes noticeably less fluid in "HD". It has a 960 x 720 preset for HD at which you can record video only records at 15 frames per second. However, you can only go up to 640 x 480 for actual video conversations. It is compatible with all major applications like Skype,Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and AOL instant Messenger. The RightSound technology ensured that sound quality was good with little hint of echo.

The press release also boasts "high definition" capability from its wide format, interpolation-free 1.3-megapixel sensor, but skimps on the hard resolution numbers and delivers live video just up to 640 x 480" at 30fps. Other features, which are quite regular to Logitech’s high-end QuickCam series, include a 4-megapixel (there's the interpolation) still camera, USB 2.0 connectivity, RightSound microphone and number of other image editing tricks. Logitech Video Effects software works with popular Web cam applications, and allows people to completely transform themselves into three-dimensional animated characters (avatars) that precisely mimic facial movements, or add accessories to their on-screen image, such as glasses, a beard, or a crown.

Also the camera comes with a fixed focus. This means the autofocus feature found in QuickCam Pro 9000 and Quickcam Pro for notebook is elusive here in this model.

Instalar os pacotes necessários:
$ sudo apt-get install libpt-plugins-v4l2 v4l2ucp subversion libsdl1.2-dev

Instalar o driver:

$ svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
$ cd trunk/
$ make
$ sudo make install

E já está! Opcionalmente, e porque o Camorama não suporta V4L2 pode-se instalar o Luvcview para testar.

$ wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz
$ zcat luvcview-20070512.tar.gz | tar xvf -
$ cd luvcview-20070512/
$ make
$ make install
$ sudo make install

My hardware dealer at first insisted that I try out a damn cheap Chinese cam costing Rs. 950. The package was as cheap as it could be made, but the demo that he showed me was impressive. So I took it home, and guess what it still didnt work, coz' there were no drivers.

So I returned it and got a Logitech Quickcam express instead (lsusb output: ID 046d:0870 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Express). I had to google and get the drivers from http://qce-ga.sourceforge.net/.

Tweaking all the stuff to make it work was a bit of a story, and I would shortly put in up at http://www.lug-delhi.org wiki. The end result is:

• xawtv works.
• gnomemeeting can show my pic
• gnomemeeting can connect and work with a remote netmeeting peer.

The pictures below show how the cam looked out of the box, and how it can look after tweaking.

Before

After